Current Research Activity
Being ‘a centre of excellence for mental health research’ is one of the core objectives in the strategy of East London NHS Foundation Trust.
To achieve this, the Trust collaborates closely with academic partners, in particular Queen Mary University of London and City University, and focuses on research that improves the delivery of mental health care in East London, strengthens the Trust’s profile and underpins its business development.
The Trust acknowledges that a clear focus of research is required to be competitive with limited resources. Currently, the focus is on forensic psychiatry, mental health nursing, and social and community psychiatry (in alphabetical order) and on a social sciences perspective of research.
However, there may sometimes be a need to balance the focus, adjust priorities and have a sufficient degree of flexibility so that the potentials of both local research initiatives and wider collaboration can be fully utilised. There is a particular interest to be flexible in the support of research initiatives of clinicians that may foster innovation and underpin service development.
Given the current focus, research uses a range of quantitative and qualitative methods and encompasses different types of primary and secondary research, including clinical trials, observational studies, in-depth interviews and studies of clinical processes, analysis of epidemiological data, and reviews.
At the same time, the focus clearly does not include many other research areas in mental health such as biological research and drug trials, although individual researchers in the Trust may collaborate on such studies.
There are a number of research studies currently active at the Trust and a series of seminars discussing their outcomes are open to all.