Imagining mental healthcare: engaging underserved local communities in Kent (INTERACT)

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The UK is facing two major crises: economic and health, which impact on the mental health and wellbeing of everyone. Adding to this, experiences of public services have worsened in recent years and regularly fall short of people's expectations: increasing budget constraints have resulted in cuts to healthcare funding. These, in turn, led to reduced accessibility and availability of healthcare with unprecedentedly lengthy waiting lists. Consequently, people have had to reassess their expectations of their healthcare system, reorienting themselves and their everyday life towards more and more precarious futures. Despite low satisfaction with healthcare services, an overwhelming majority of the UK population still expresses unwavering support for a national health service (NHS). To capture people's emotions and re-imaginations of what the future NHS might look like, we propose INTERACT, an ethnographic enquiry underpinned by arts-based, creatives methodologies, with a genuine collaborative ethos and an inclusive interdisciplinary approach to co-producing knowledge around mental healthcare. INTERACT will synergise creative, scientific and applied perspectives of mental healthcare by amplifying the voices of those hardly reached in research. The interdisciplinary INTERACT team, led by Dikomitis, a medical anthropologist, is comprised of 1 medical anthropologist expert in creative ethnographic methods (Bonanno), 3 psychiatrists (Rodda, Shergill and Tracy), 1 media scholar (Declercq), 2 creative arts therapists working in Kent mental health services (Le Fleuve and Richardson) and 2 project partners (Turner Contemporary and the Kent-wide community mental health trust, KMPT).In INTERACT, Kent local communities will have an equal voice in the conversation of research. As such, INTERACT public engagement activities are designed to maximise the involvement of mental healthcare services' recipients and benefit from a bottom-up approach to community involvement. INTERACT researchers will engage members from underserved communities who face systemic mental health challenges. Our geographic focus is Kent, which faces particular challenges of deprivation and limited access to public healthcare services. Addressing these challenges are at the heart of the vision statement of new Kent and Medway Medical School, where the INTERACT team is located.We will work with four distinct communities, offering perspectives across the life course and from different demographic backgrounds, i.e., 1) young people; 2) new mothers; 3) older adults; and 4) migrants. Through a series of creative workshops, led by drama therapists working in mental health services, and using ethnographic methods, INTERACT will engage 4 groups, with 10 representatives from these underserved communities to capture their lived experiences. Through these activities, underserved communities will become meaningful stakeholders by communicating their needs and interests for the future of mental healthcare in Kent. Participants will be paid for their time involvement, following best practice in patient and public involvement (PPI), and will be recruited through the PPI team at the Kent-wide community mental health trust, the Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust (KMPT). The workshops will be hosted in the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate, which has a track record of socially-engaged arts-based practice, and has been a driving force in the regeneration of the East Kent area. Insights from the workshops will be disseminated through a touring exhibitions, public talks, graphic media (zine), podcasts, Tik-Tok videos and other social media used by the INTERACT communities, a policy brief and a journal article.