Project plan

We are working with people with lived experience of severe mental illness to develop an approach to reducing cardiovascular risk specially tailored for people with severe mental illness.

Step 1: Get evidence and planning

To do this, we’ve got to make sure the support we offer is something that works for people living with severe mental illness.  We can’t do that without involving the people who will be impacted by the new peer support clinics we will be testing. We will review the current knowledge about lifestyle support for people with severe mental illness.

Then we will hold focus groups to capture the experiences of people with severe mental illness to make sure their experiences and expertise are at the core of what we do. We will then work with peer workers, health professionals and people with severe mental illness to co-produce the peer-supported group clinics to try to find something that will work in a real-world setting.

Step 2: See if it works

We’ll then take all the information we’ve learned and put it into practice in a small study to test if it might work in practice, and what changes we could make to improve it.

To do this, we will train group facilitators and run group clinics for 8-12 people in each of the five mental health Trusts. We will interview people attending, delivering, and using the groups to find out how things worked and what might be improved. This learning will then go on to the next step: a bigger study.

Step 3: Give it a go

We will conduct a trial of peer-supported group clinics in five areas:

• East London
• North London
• Nottingham
• Birmingham
• South West London.

There will be two groups: one who receives the peer support and another group who do not. 260 people at risk of cardiovascular disease will be randomly allocated to the peer group support and another 260 will be offered written lifestyle advice in addition to their usual care.

To find out if the peer support was successful, one year later we will look at people’s risk of cardiovascular disease. We will also find out if it improved people’s wellbeing, and social connectedness using questionnaires.

Step 4: We won’t stop there

We will share our findings as widely as possible. We will work with charities, our lived experience advisory group and patient groups to reach a wide audience. We will work with health decisionmakers at different levels to help put our research into practice. We aim to leave a positive long-term legacy in the lives of people living with severe mental illness.

Get involved

We will post details of how to get involved in the PEGASUS project as soon as we are able to work with participants. In the meantime, please get in touch with any questions at: pegasus@city.ac.uk