Top 10 achievements of 2020
1. Our membership has grown to over 1,600 members across research, policy, practice and lived experience, with over 3,200 people now following us on Twitter. Our website has received over 60K visits over the past year. It has been such a pleasure building on our relationships with members.
2. We have worked with you as a network, sharing 12 newsletters involving 132 spotlights on practice, over 96 policy updates, over 60 funding opportunities, and over 55 new research papers. Over 706 of you have taken part in our Basecamp discussion forum and we have run 13 Special Interest Groups involving 859 members.
3. We have distributed over £270,000 in Plus Funds, funding 8 Sandpit events that were attended by over 150 people and 7 new research grants that are currently underway.
4. We have worked with over 300 members of the network to co-produce a new Research Agenda for the field, which is due to be published shortly. This highlights the research gaps that you have identified that most urgently need filling.
5. We have worked with the MARCH Disciplinary Expert Group to identify “mechanisms of action” that link leisure engagement to mental and physical health, in total mapping over 600 mechanisms that have been either proposed or tested and have synthesised these into a new framework using the lens of complexity science. The paper will be published shortly in Lancet Psychiatry.
6. We have published an evidence synthesis report with the World Health Organisation that brings together the findings from over 3,000 studies on arts and health, and produced follow-on policy briefings for WHO and the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport. We have also spoken about our work to the UN and several All Party Parliamentary Groups.
7. We have been working to map the barriers and motivators to social, cultural and community engagement and have run focus groups and interviews with network members including individuals with lived experience of mental illness, GPs involved in social prescribing, and community organisations. We’ve also analysed data from national datasets and published our findings in six scientific papers.
8. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we published a Creative Isolation page, profiling the online work of network members and other organisations to support mental health and wellbeing. Our page received over 80,000 hits in April alone and was cited as an example of excellence in Covid-19 response by Arts Council England.
9. We established the COVID-19 Social Study to map the psychological and social experiences of individuals during the pandemic. Additionally funded by the Wellcome Trust and Nuffield Foundation, this study has gathered over 750,000 surveys from over 72,000 individuals since March and we have additionally undertaken over 200 telephone interviews with specific groups. The study is providing real-time data on the impact of the pandemic to policy makers, community organisations and members of the public.
10. We launched the COVID Minds Network to support and encourage collaboration between teams from over 130 longitudinal mental health studies running across 70 different countries. So our work is now international!
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