Changing Futures: Improving mental health and wellbeing through trauma-informed support for people with multiple disadvantages

Project aims

The Applied Research Collaboration West has received funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research Three Research Schools Mental Health Practice Evaluation Scheme to evaluate the work of Changing Futures. We will look at how Changing Futures can develop better support services for people who’ve experienced trauma and mental distress.

We will:

• Explore and compare how organisations can support people with multiple disadvantages through different trauma-informed approaches
• Find out what gets in the way of providing trauma-informed care and develop strategies to overcome these issues
• Involve practitioners, stakeholders and people with lived experience in our evaluation
• See whether the changes that Changing Futures makes to services are effective
• Share what we learn across different services and systems

What we hope to achieve

We hope that our results will improve the recovery and wellbeing of people with multiple disadvantages by making services more trauma-informed. These services will focus on people, meet their needs and reduce health inequalities.

We have already conducted a staff survey. See the summary of the findings and what is happening in the areas highlighted by the survey (PDF).

How we use your data

We will be using data that is routinely collected from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities (DLUHC) national evaluation dataset of the Changing Futures programme, which collects information on clients of Changing Futures at three-monthly intervals, to analyse whether the programme has been effective at supporting clients who’ve experienced multiple disadvantage.

We will be inviting staff involved in Changing Futures and some of its partner organisations to take part in a staff survey, interviews and observations of meetings. To know more about how we use your data for the study, please see the privacy notice (PDF). If you do not want your data to be included in the study, you can request for your information to be removed from the databases we will be using.

What are your rights?

The data is held solely for research purposes. You have a right to be informed about the study, its use of the data, and how long we will hold the data for. Information about this will be provided in participant information sheets that we will provide to potential participants to invite them to take part in the study. For further information please also see our data privacy notice (PDF).