The EQUITy Trial
EQUITy is a 5-year NIHR Programme aimed at enhancing the quality of and improving engagement with psychological interventions delivered by telephone at Step 2 in IAPT Services. We are testing the EQUITy intervention in a large randomised controlled trial, and aim to recruit 26 IAPT services.
The EQUITy intervention has been developed based on the best research and clinical evidence available and has three elements:
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Guidelines for services, team workshops, and follow-up meetings
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Practitioner telephone training
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Resources for patients.
Do you think your service could be one of our sites?
A guide to what's involved
As part of the trial, services will be randomly allocated to either receive the EQUITy intervention package or to be a “control” site (i.e. not receive the intervention and continue to deliver care as usual). Service involvement will last approximately 12 months and involves:
- Recruitment to our ‘enriched patient sample’ – we aim to recruit 100 patients from each service. This will involve sending invitations (prepared by the research team) to all patients allocated to telephone treatment as close to their initial appointment as possible. We estimate the time commitment involved in sending invitations will be around 2-4 hours over 6 months.
- Collection of routine IAPT data – we will be collecting this for both before and after the EQUITy intervention. Services will be asked to provide this to us in an anonymised format.
In addition, sites who are allocated to the intervention arm with receive the ‘EQUITy Intervention Package’ which involves:
- A one-day team workshop – introducing the EQUITy intervention, via Zoom or Teams
- Practitioner telephone training – two training sessions via Zoom or Teams
- A follow-up meeting with the action plan lead to discuss implementation progress (further meetings are offered if required)
- Distribution of resources for patients –provided to sites in either electronic and/or hard-copy form
- Qualitative interviews – team members and patients will be invited to provide their feedback.
Service Support Costs
Service support costs will be made available to sites allocated to both arms of the trial to support the recruitment of patients for the enriched sample.
Continuing Professional Development
All team members who take part in the EQUITy trial will receive certificates to demonstrate their involvement for continuing professional development.
Download
For a downloadable version of our information for sites, click here.
How to get involved
Please contact the Programme Manager, Judith Gellatly who will be happy to provide further details and answer any questions
Contact us
Email: equityMH@manchester.ac.uk
Programme Manager: judith.gellatly@manchester.ac.uk
Twitter: @EQUITyMH
This project is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Programme Grants for Applied Research NIHR programme (RP-PG-1016-20010). The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.