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Partners and collaborators: Bradford Primary Care Trust, Sharing Voices Bradford, Bradford District Care Trust, Professor David Cottrell, Ms Shaista Meer, Professor Alan House, Dr Dean McMillan Funded by the National Institute for Health Research
National healthcare policies state that professionals should take account of cultural identity and provide appropriate healthcare for minority ethnic and religious groups. Professionals may get little practical support to do this however and there is very little research evidence about how to meet the needs of minority faith groups.
Some people in Muslim communities experience higher rates and longer periods of mental ill-health than other groups. There is evidence that services that draw on faith as a resource can help reduce or prevent long-term depression and improve people’s quality of life. However, community-based services have little or no impact on mainstream NHS healthcare and reach only a small minority of people. Little evidence has been available about how to develop faith-based approaches for Muslim service users in the UK.
Aim & Objectives
To fill the gap in knowledge about how best to address the needs of Muslim service users with depression through:
Adapting a mental health therapy called Behavioural Activation, combining existing approaches with evidence from existing research and practice to produce a guidance manual for practitioners
Gathering feedback on how acceptable and useful Muslim service users and their therapists find the guidance manual and using this feedback to further improve the manual
Outlining in detail important principles and effective methods for treating Muslim service users from a variety of ethnic backgrounds
Methods
The research was undertaken in four parts which broadly followed the MRC guidelines for the development of complex interventions:
Phase 1: Synthesis of literature Phase 2: Interviews with key informants Phase 3: Synthesis and production of treatment manual Phase 4: Piloting
Results and Resources
The following publicly available resources have been developed to help practitioners and Muslim clients. If you are interested in using these resources within a mental health service we would be grateful if you could contact Ghazala Mir with further details about how you plan to work with these:
The adapted therapy is being delivered in a number of primary care mental health services across England and therapy teams have been given training to support this. A BBC article covering the research has raised awareness of the approach nationally and internationally.