Anyone who’s spent any time at all on the Mental Elf website, or any of the other National Elf Service sites, knows that we elves love succinct and focused summaries that are easy to read and quick to digest.

It’s always a delight to see other groups publishing similar resources, so I’ve decided today to simply highlight some good work going on in the NIHR CLAHRC teams. For those of you who don’t know, NIHR stands for National Institute of Health Research and CLAHRC stands for Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care. There are 9 CLAHRCs dotted around England and they all produce BITE-sized summaries aimed at health professionals and managers.

The BITEs (Brokering Innovation Through Evidence – snappy ;-) ) tend to be based on relatively recent research (published in the last 3 years), whereas the briefing papers are often summaries of much older guidance and policy.

BITEs of particular interest to mental health professionals include:

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough

BITEs (Brokering Innovation Through Evidence)

• Improving access to psychological therapies
• Mental health training for foster carers
• Suicide prevention – a joint BITE in collaboration with Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire CLAHRC

Briefing papers

• Alternatives to anti-psychotic drugs for patients with dementia
• Improving access to psychological therapies
• Incidence and prevalence of psychotic disorders in England
• Transfer of care at 17
• Detection of autism spectrum conditions
• Health service user transitions in mental health services
• Designing and implementing a Youth Mental Health Service

Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire

Mental Health BITES

• Personality Disorder
  • Access to Specialist Services in Personality Disorder
  • Delphi Survey (Personality Disorder)
  • Improving treatment engagement (Personality Disorder)
• Individual Placement and Support (IPS)
  • IPS Employment Support 
• Dental and physical health needs
• Active treatment of chronic depression
• Collaboration for depression
• Computerised CBT
• Integrated management for depression

Children and Young People BITEs

• Exercise in children
• Consensus on Assessment and Treatment Outcome Measures (CATO) in CAMHS

You can find a complete list of all 9 CLAHRCs on the NIHR website and there is apparently a library in development that will bring together all of these resources.

I must admit that I wasn’t aware of these publications until quite recently, so it will be interesting to see if they are promoted more widely as I suspect the existing user-base for them is quite limited, whereas the potential audience is huge.  It certainly seems quite difficult to  keep up to date with all of the important publications coming out of the NIHR, even for an information science ninja like me!

It’s worth noting that the CLAHRCs also offer tailored evidence services for people working in the NHS, so if you have a real-life issue that needs clarifying with some quality assessed evidence, it may be worth contacting your local CLAHRC to see if they can help. Take a look at this summary of the Leeds, York and Bradford service (PDF) as an example of how this service works.

If you need help

If you need help and support now and you live in the UK or the Republic of Ireland, please call the Samaritans on 116 123.

If you live elsewhere, we recommend finding a local Crisis Centre on the IASP website.

We also highly recommend that you visit the Connecting with People: Staying Safe resource.