Now in its 18th year, the prestigious awards celebrate the achievements of individuals and teams working within the NHS, industry and academia, who have risen to the challenge improving services provided to patients, either through a technical innovation or through better service delivery.
Our research project: Food Insecurity in Adults with Severe Mental Illness (SMI) has been nominated in the Cross-organisation Working to Deliver Research category.
The research is the first of its kind in the UK to learn more about adults living with food insecurity and severe mental illness (SMI) in northern England.
Often referred to as food poverty, food insecurity is the lack of financial resources needed to ensure that a person has reliable access to enough food to meet their dietary, nutritional and social needs.
Researchers and clinicians are working alongside people with lived experience of SMI, including schizophrenia and related psychoses, and bipolar disorder, to learn more about their experience of food insecurity and find out how services can support people living with SMI to access healthy, affordable food.
The data collection for the study is now complete and our researchers broke new ground by recruiting people with lived experience of SMI to undertake the research interviews.
The research is hosted by our Trust, jointly led by Jo Smith (Clinical Academic and Consultant Dietitian) and Dr Emma Giles (Associate Professor Public Health, Teesside University), in collaboration with Fuse, the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health (Teesside University & Newcastle University) and Equally Well UK (a collaborative hosted by the Centre for Mental Health). It is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the research partner of the NHS, public health and social care, for the NIHR Patient Benefit – Mental Health in the North programme.
The team will find out if they have been successful at the Bright Ideas in Health Awards ceremony on 23 March.
The winners of the 10 categories will receive a cash prize and support from innovation experts at the Academic Health Science Network for the North East and North Cumbria to progress their ideas.
