Decisions, decisions: Community Navigator Study Working Group Meeting 5

Like our fourth meeting, the fifth meeting was about coming together to find out people’s views on key components of the support programme. Specifically, in this meeting, we’d spend some time discussing two areas to help us work out what direction to go in: 1) types of mapping and goal-setting tools and 2) the use of groups.

We started by looking at a mapping tool, which has been used by the McPin Foundation in previous research studies on Wellbeing and Connectedness and could be used by a community navigator to start conversations about the social world with the person they are supporting. What people felt was really useful about this mapping tool is that it produces a visual representation of a person’s social connections. It shows who is in the person’s life, the closeness a person feels towards those in their social network, and the links between people in their network. There’s also the possibility that it can be used not only to map people in a person’s network, but also the places and activities which are so important for a sense of connection to the community.

Following this discussion, we split into groups for an exercise which really allowed people to show their creative sides. Each group was asked to design a goal setting tool which would support people to set goals around improving community connections and reducing loneliness. Ideas varied around the room, with some groups, focusing on goals related to people, place and activity, whilst others focused on specific actions, such as reconnecting, new connections, activities and identity. There was, however, definite agreement that goals could cover different time periods, such as short, medium and long-term goals. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be coming to a decision about the tools we’ll use and will use feedback from the preliminary trial stage to refine whatever methods we decide upon.

We then recapped some of the information from session four about whether we create groups for participants to attend as part of the support programme, particularly focusing on the Groups4Health option. Through a lively discussion of the pros and cons of including this alongside the support from community navigators, an agreement was reached that given its promising evidence base, it is worth trying out in the preliminary trial, to see how it fits alongside the other elements of the community navigator support, and most importantly, whether it is something that participants find helpful.

To get us thinking about the mechanisms through which the community navigator support programme may reduce loneliness for people, we completed an exercise in small groups. Alongside each of the three components of De Jong-Gierveld’s (2011) framework for alleviating loneliness: 1) Increasing the use of support available from existing relationships 2) Developing new social connections and 3) Changing your thinking about current social relationships, groups wrote which elements of the planned navigator support they felt would impact these components.

This work will contribute to a Theory of Change that we’ll be developing which will provide a visual description of how and why the different aspects of the community navigator programme leads to desired changes being realised.

Next we spent some time considering the community navigator’s training and supervision. The group first considered what types of training the community navigators should have. We will post our ideas for training in the next few weeks. What do you think? Is there any essential training that you think navigators need?

Moving on to supervision, there was clear consensus that we needed to get this right and there was discussion about whether twice monthly group supervision was sufficient. This is definitely something we’ll be in discussion about with services involved in the study – the Camden and Islington Complex Depression, Anxiety and Trauma (CDAT) team and the Barnet Complex Care Team (CCT), as well as the members of our working group from these services.

To finish off the meeting, we spoke about the fast-approaching interviews for community navigators. We had a look at the interview questions and made some final tweaks to ensure we get a clear picture of candidates’ skills and approach. It’s going to be a really interesting process, with candidates first responding to scenarios posed by a panel made up of members of our working group with lived experience of mental health problems, followed by a more formal interview process with a panel of researchers and practitioners. This really shows the coproduction approach we’re taking to this study in action.

At our next meeting towards the end of July, we’re hoping to have completed a draft manual for the community navigators, ready to get people’s thoughts on. We’ll also be looking at the outcome measures to make sure these are capturing important aspects of the participant experience and are suitable to use with people. Plus they’ll be updates on the community navigator roles and the people we have in post. It’s definitely an exciting time as we near the start of people receiving support from the community navigators.

If you have any thoughts or questions about the study, or would like more information, contact Kate via k.fullarton@ucl.ac.uk or @ucl_loneliness.