http://www.abs.aston.ac.uk/newweb/research/projects.asp#Effective
Professor Walid El Ansari is a co investigator on the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) -funded “Effective Team Working in Mental Health” study (about £0.5 Million). This is a three-year multi-disciplinary project (2008-2011) that aims to generate national guidelines to the enablers of, and barriers to, effective team working in mental health care in the NHS. This collaboration is between several centres of expertise at Universities in the UK and Spain.
Mental health care requires the careful collaboration of professionals from different occupational groups (e.g. psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, social workers), as well as from different employers (e.g. mental health trusts, primary care trusts, local authorities). However, evidence from the NHS national staff survey suggests that as many as 50% of staff in mental health trusts are working in groups that do not display all the characteristics required for good team working. This work will consider not only how members of the same team work together to provide health care, but also how teams and agencies interact in the interests of service users. It will focus on teams providing care to working-age adults and older adults. It would be implemented in about 13-15 NHS Trusts, and is based around four stages: Defining mental health team effectiveness; a Quantitative study; a Qualitative study; and Evaluation of interventions.