TRANSFORM, led by Professor Swaran Singh at Warwick Medical School, has been showcased in a Community Engagement and Involvement pilot study run by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

The TRANSFORM project aims to improve access to care and outcomes of serious mental disorders in slums, with study sites in Bangladesh and Nigeria. The researchers are working to develop an innovative collaborative care model involving traditional healers, mental health professionals, primary care practitioners and community health workers.

As part of a pilot study, the NIHR in collaboration with Better Decisions Together recently ran three Community Engagement and Involvement (CEI) storytelling workshops to showcase TRANSFORM and two other studies from their Research on Interventions for Global Health Transformation portfolio. The aim of the sessions was to demonstrate how individuals and communities become involved in research and the value that they add to research.

During the TRANSFORM session, five people involved in the project in Nigeria and four in Bangladesh joined virtually, including faith healers, traditional healers, caregivers and people with lived experience of serious mental health disorders. They were each given the opportunity to share their stories and describe how they had become involved in the research, what they had been doing, their reflections on their experience and what difference they hoped their involvement would make to the future.

Professor Swaran Singh says: “The CEI workshop was an exemplar of community engagement in global health projects. It offered an opportunity for the community to come together and share their stories in a creative way. Participation in the workshop was empowering for participants and the visual outputs produced over the course of the workshop highlighted how their input and their voice helps to shape the research.”

The report from the study, ‘Enhancing Community Engagement and Involvement through Storytelling’, can be downloaded here