About the project

Integrating our Mental and Physical Healthcare Systems (IMPHS) was a 3-year funded project commissioned by the Maudsley Charity that sits within the Mind & Body Programme at King’s Health Partners, hosted by South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (FT), and delivered in partnership with King’s College London concluding in March 2023.

Read the IMPHS booklet here or watch our webinar below for an overview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hVZgb_gI_k

IMPHS is great work – it is fantastic to see the emphasis on evaluation, sustainability, and lessons for implementation. We all know how hard this work is, and how much it matters.

- Dr Mary Jane Docherty, Deputy Medical Director, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust

Project aims

The project sought to:

  • Understand barriers that adults living with long-term mental illnesses may face when managing their physical healthcare;
  • Test and evaluate interventions that could better facilitate integrated mental and physical healthcare in routine practice for patients accessing services both now and in the future.

In doing so, the project aimed to develop a body of work that could be shared with healthcare staff, commissioners, organisations, patients and carers to support high quality physical healthcare for adults with long-term mental health problems.

Project legacy

This legacy page outlines the key outcomes, learnings and opportunities for improvement identified through delivery of the IMPHS project and has been written with clinical and non-clinical professionals in mind. Our hope in sharing our portfolio in this way, is to share evidence of a range of physical health interventions that could inform the work healthcare staff and organisations do to improve health outcomes for adults living with long-term mental illnesses.

Working with Experts By Experience

A commitment of the IMPHS project was to champion the involvement of people with lived experience (known within the project as “Experts by Experience”), to ensure the voice of people living with a serious mental illness and associated physical health problems, as well as carers of people with those conditions and experiences were included in the development and delivery of the project.

At the end of the IMPHS project, we reflected with our experts on our approach to involving people with lived experience in our projects and realised we may have some learning that other project teams could benefit from in their current and potentially future work. We wanted to share what we have learned and do so with the input from Experts by Experience based on their experiences of working with us and on our projects.

With our Experts by Experience, we have co-developed a series of key principles based on our learning of what worked well on the IMPHS project and collated it into a Toolkit. Our toolkit contains the views of both the experts and the project team of the benefits of including Experts by Experience in project work as well as practical examples of how we created good working relationships to benefit both the project and the experts involved.

Research and evaluation

Evaluation of the IMPHS project was led by researchers from King’s College London – Centre for Implementation Science in collaboration with colleagues from King’s College London – Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience: Department for Psychosis Studies and the universities of East Anglia and Southampton.It is hoped that any changes we make to physical healthcare within South London and Maudsley NHS FT and its partner organisations, either by improving and integrating existing pathways and systems or through the adoption of new initiatives, will be of interest to other NHS Trusts and external organisations. We hope our work will be useful in planning for service development, and that it can be used to provide recommendations for future practice and research.

You can find out more about the project and our learnings by watching the webinar series here.

Acknowledgements

Our funders

Thank you to the Maudsley Charity for its continued support in delivery of the
IMPHs project since 2019. The Maudsley Charity works in partnership with South London and Maudsley NHS FT and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London to promote positive change in the world of mental health. They support innovation,
research and service improvement, working with patients and families, clinical care teams, researchers and community organisations with a common goal of improving mental health.

Our partners

Thank you to King’s Health Partners for its unwavering commitment to promoting integrating mind and body care, and the access this partnership has provided to be able to work collaboratively
with organisations (King’s Health Partners, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS FT, South London and Maudsley NHS FT and King’s College London), clinical services, teams, professionals, and experts by experience that have contributed significantly to the overall quality and outcomes of the IMPHS project.

With particular thanks to the following groups and organisations that have supported the IMPHS programme over the last three years

All the staff, service users and carers across South London and Maudsley NHS FT and King’s College Hospital for their time, expertise and involvement.

All our colleagues at the Centre for Implementation Science at King’s College London and Universities of East Anglia and Southampton. All our associates at the South London and Maudsley NHS FT Quality Centre, South London and Maudsley NHS FT Partners, the South London and Maudsley NHS FT Volunteer Network, UCL Partners, Oxleas NHS FT, the Centre for Mental Health, Equally Well and Consultant Connect.

To find out more about the IMPHS project, please contact us at mindandbody@slam.nhs.uk.