In July 2020, we delivered a project for Health Education England with the aim of developing and updating resources to support the adaptation of a Making Every Contact Count (MECC) approach in mental healthcare settings.
About the programme
Making Every Contact Count 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 healthcare interactions for a brief or very brief discussion on health & wellbeing. Evidence suggests that the broad adoption of the MECC approach by people and organisations across health and social care could have a significant impact on the health of our population. There is also growing research and evidence to support the use of MECC as an intervention in other settings including education, construction, the police and prison service and community services.
As part of the project, we developed Six key outputs:
These documents build on the existing MECC core resources with specific adaptions and suggestions that would be beneficial in Mental health settings although they are transferable to primary care and acute services. We advise using our documents in conjunction with the following original core MECC publications:
| A consensus statement
| Organisational change and development guide | fact sheet |
| An implementation guide MECC in MH
| A quality marker checklist for MECC- Mental Health training
| An evaluation framework
|
Key findings and additions
Below you can find a snapshot of the key additions that have been included in the each of the 6 keys documents we have created.
Consensus statement
- Improving physical health in patients with severe mental illness
- Service user involvement and coproduction is at the heart of everything
Organisational change and development guide
- New approach to help embed the MECC intervention into the workplace.
- Describes 8 key steps of Kotter’s theory of organisational change
- Contains case-based scenarios to give clear examples on how to apply theory into practice
A fact sheet
- Resource to answer key questions surrounding, organisational change, service user involvement and co production
- Response to addressing barriers in the workplace when implementing MECC without increasing workload
- Provides a quick overview of topics to include in training when working supporting people with mental health needs
A quality marker checklist for MECC- Mental Health training
- has additions including targeting unhealthy lifestyles behaviours (sexual health, substance misuse, debt, suicide, medicine adherence & service user involvement
- Additional resources to access and include within training
- Suggestion of coproduction and service user input
An implementation guide MECC in MH
- This guide has specific considerations for the implementation of MECC in different mental health settings (inpatient, community CAMHS)
- Aligns activities to organisation change activities to aid the implementation
- Additional section on service user involvement, with appropriate guidance
The evaluation framework
- Evaluating organisational readiness, outcomes & delivery, staff readiness
- Measuring service user involvement, outcomes and benefits
- measuring its success and impact both in the short and long term, and the effectiveness of training
Project team
Hannah Iannelli (primary researcher)
Chris Attoe (Support researcher)
If you are interested in additional information about this project, our other MECC related work or interested in commissioning us to do similar work for your organisation, please get in touch with us Mlresearch@slam.nhs.uk
Acknowledgements
This work was funded and supported by Health Education England (Now NHS England). We would like to sincerely thank all participants, and NHS trusts for their contribution to this exciting project.
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