Psychosis HIT highlights for 2020-21

Psychosis HIT Directors Dr Sarah Sullivan, Dr Simon Downer, Dr Martin Jones and James Robinson look back on the team’s activities from the past year.

Although the Psychosis HIT has been officially ‘on pause’ over the last year, important work related to improving the support, treatment, services and lives of local people with psychosis has been ongoing.

Sarah has been developing the work of the ‘P Risk’ project which is an algorithm to predict risk of psychosis using primary care electronic health records of consultation history and sociodemographic variables. Through our HIT’s patient and public involvement workstream, successful workshops were held in January 2021 to support the development of this significant project. We hope to continue expanding the ‘P Risk’ work as it will form a key part of our HIT’s priorities for the upcoming year.

We have also been involved in the RADAR Trial, through Simon’s work as Principal Investigator. RADAR is a multi-centre randomised control trial looking at reduction in antipsychotics for people with long-term psychosis who are in secondary mental health care.

The established Psychosis HIT Service User Reference Group has also been contributing to the development of the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) Community Mental Health Framework. The Group has been able to link people with lived experience of psychosis to take part in workshops, led by the Independent Mental Health Network, to shape the Framework.

To work more closely with the BNSSG Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), we have identified a new approach of collaborating on specific projects linked to the CCG’s Mental Health Cell. To date, we have been involved in the Serious Mental Illness service redesign project and we are excited to be working with the CCG on this and we hope to ensure coordination, evaluation and maximise effectiveness and quality of the services being redesigned.