See below for all the latest news from the FReSH START project.
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Results 1 to 10 of 14
As part of my pre-doctoral fellowship and work with the FReSH START project, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend the International Association for Suicide Prevention conference in June 2025. The conference took place in Vienna, a beautiful city with a rich psychological history, which I was able to learn more about...
At the end of April, we finished recruitment to the FReSH START randomised controlled trial and a total of 337 participants were recruited. This is an incredible achievement, and we are very grateful to everyone involved who has helped us get to this stage. FReSH START is a programme of research which seeks to develop...
The lived experience group is a very important part of the FReSH START research team. We believe in the saying, “nothing about us, without us”. This means a project about self-harm needs input from people who know what this can be like. We are in the process of recruiting people with lived experience of self-harm...
Marsha McAdam is a mental health campaigner with lived experience of self-harm and she chairs the FReSH START Lived Experience Group. Marsha has been involved with the FReSH START study from an early stage and continues to be integral to the study. As recruitment to the clinical trial continues, we spoke to her about what...
Recruiting participants to any research study is always a challenge, something the research team here at the University fully understand. However, because most of that recruitment work takes place on site, in the hospitals we are working with, we do not always have a very detailed insight into what the challenges are, and what we...
People with lived experience are increasingly being asked to take part in teaching for trainee clinicians, to offer a first-hand perspective of what it’s like to live with a mental health condition and the impact of being involved with professionals for care and support. One of our FReSH START collaborators reflects on his experiences of...
We believe public and patient involvement (PPI) in mental health research is vital: the best way to improve services is to make sure we are listening to the voices of the people who need them. What does this look like in practice? In FReSH START, we built PPI into the whole process. The programme aims...
Just over a year ago we suspended the FReSH START feasibility study, as the COVID pandemic hit and lockdown was introduced. This was disappointing but of course, the only option given the severity of the situation and the need to prioritise and protect NHS staff and resources. Thankfully the feasibility study had only just opened...
The FReSH START team carried out a study over the summer looking at how people who self-harm have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and how they’ve been accessing support. We presented our findings at an online seminar on Tuesday 24th November and you can re-watch Cara’s presentation here: The presentation was followed by an...
Service user involvement has become a key part of research and many funding bodies now have it as a requirement to secure funding. However, as Laidlaw Undergraduate Scholar Lizzie Mitchell found out in her work this summer, this service user involvement comes in many different forms. It can range from simply informing service users of...