Workshop 2

Practical guide to Mental Well-being Impact Assessments

Nerys Edmonds, SLAM

1) Presentation

Was a Natures Gym at Lewisham (Council)
Growing food – in Southwark, Crossal LSOA
Health Trainers – UEL working on positive psychology
Healthy Schools Programme – MIND in Richmond – running a time bank
Shoreditch First – community festival (intergenerational) 
LIFT – Integrating arts and theatre
Enfield Parks Department – developing a pensioners programme, looking at delivering different creative projects for using parks in a more creative way not just pretty flower beds

Factors: 

-Enhancing control
-Resilience - what abilities enable us to cope with good and bad times?
-What are our community assets – e.g. strong and healthy voluntary sector, access to parks, healthy walks, volunteers.
- Participation
- In conclusion – looks at positive identity

2) Feedback following table discussion of these factors

Table 1

Participation 0 highlighted “benefit traps” people participate to tick boxes, get a sense of achievement but actually people don’t move forward in life. They stay as they are because they are more familiar with not being in paid employment and receiving benefits.
MWIA tool brings people from different perspectives, participants and service users into a good debate. As often projects impacts are viewed from the project managers view but the MWIA facilitates dialogue and includes the service users views, which will be different.

Table 2

Also looked at participation. Enfield has both affluent and deprived boroughs. These are barriers to participation and access to services

Table 3

Looked at resilience.

3) Went through the MWIA tool (reference to powerpoint print outs).

1 – Think about your target audience/ community profile. Who will the project target?
2 – What is the existing evidence that the activity has an impact on mental well-being?
3 – After doing the initial research you then bring together stakeholders and participants to a rapid mental well-being workshop and look at the control factors. You get a sense from the stakeholders what factors are important to them. This process does highlight the impacts of a project which then enables us to address these issues. Our of this process participants highlight 12 priority areas and develop an action plan to address/change the project.

Key benefits

-	Bringing a commissioner and service user together to discuss what mental well-being means to them.
-	Identify your priority impacts and then integrate monitoring and evaluation to measure these impacts.

Questions

Measures are set up before the project is developed at the proposal stage. How does the MWIA fit in?
-	A perspective MWIA can take place before the project begins as long as the right people are involved.

How can we access the training and how much will it cost?
-	SLAM can come in and do training, but we have also trained officers in 19 boroughs to do a MWIA and they can be involved.

How can we sell MWIA to the DPH and fit it in our targets?
-	Mental health well-being integrated into the Government guidance mental health impacts and is being embedded in policy. Relates to the Nis. No need to set up a project to deliver against mental well-being, but it’s about working at your main service delivery and how it impacts on mental well-being.