Well-being at Work Consultancy
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Make Every Contact Count in Mental Health Settings

11 May 2021
3 min read

Making Every Contact Count in Mental health settings

In July 2020, we delivered a project for Health Education England with the aim of developing and updating resources to support the adoption of a Making Every Contact Count (MECC) approach in mental healthcare settings.

About the programme

Making Every Contact Count (MECC) is an approach to behaviour change that uses the millions of day-to-day interactions that organisations and people have with other people to support them in making positive changes to their physical and mental health and wellbeing.

MECC maximises the opportunity within routine health and care interactions for a brief or very brief discussion on health or wellbeing factors to take place. Evidence suggests that the broad adoption of the MECC approach by people and organisations across health and care could potentially have a significant impact on the health of our population.

As part of the project, we developed five key outputs:

  1. A quality marker checklist for Making Every Contact Count (MECC) training in mental health settings
  2. An implementation guide with specific considerations for the implementation of MECC in mental health settings
  3. An evaluation framework tailored to the evaluation of MECC Inputs, Outputs and Outcomes in mental health settings
  4. A consensus statement that builds on the existing MECC Consensus Statement, considering mental health settings
  5. A fact sheet describing the key concepts and considerations for applying MECC in mental health settings.

Main project outcomes

​Presentation for MECC in Mental health setting​

Key highlights

  1. MECC in mental health settings has two main concepts:
    • Improving physical health in patients with severe mental illness
    • Service user involvement is at the heart of everything
  2. Our organisation change and development guide contains case-based scenarios to give clear examples on how to apply theory into practice
  3. The quality market checklist has a number of additions including targeting unhealthy lifestyles behaviours, additional topics to be included in training and having service user involvement
  4. The implementation guide includes additional resources and aligns to Kotter’s 8 step theory of organisation change
  5. Evaluation guides provide clear examples of how to measure the progress of implementing MECC, measuring its success and impact both in the short and long term, and the effectiveness of training.

Further information

If you are interested in learning more about the MECC intervention please see the below resources:

Hannah Iannelli was the main researcher on this project, for more information please contact hannah.iannelli@slam.nhs.uk

Acknowledgements

This work was funded and supported by Health Education England. We would like to sincerely thank all participants for their contribution to this exciting project.

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