Mental Health Award: Accelerating scalable Digital Mental Health Interventions

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Nominations are now open for the Mental Health Award: Accelerating scalable Digital Mental Health Interventions. This call will fund research to evaluate and further develop scalable digital interventions to advance early intervention in depression, anxiety and psychosis. Teams must include the research expertise required to drive the proposed research, an organization which can take the intervention to scale (whether a company or not-for-profit) and lived experience experts.

Mental Health Award Funding Information

Funding amount: £3 to 7 million per project
Funding duration: Up to 5 years

The proposed intervention:

should target symptom(s) and/or functional impairments related to anxiety, depression or psychosis to advance early intervention
can include (but is not limited to) software, artificial intelligence, web-based programmes, mobile applications, chatbots, extended reality, wearable devices or video games
can be standalone or adjunct to other treatments and can be designed for delivery in a range of settings such as healthcare, workplaces, schools, homes or other environments
Proposals should also demonstrate the potential for the developed intervention to be delivered at scale, considering factors such as acceptability, affordability, feasibility and sustainability.
They expect that projects will have both a minimum viable product and feasibility data. Proposals should plan for evaluations of the intervention, employing appropriate comparators.

A range of designs are eligible such as (but not limited to):

clinical trials
case-control studies
quasi-experimental designs
real-world evidence generation studies
hybrid effectiveness-implementation studies

Eligibility Criteria For Mental Health Award

To apply for this award, teams must include researchers, an organisation (whether a company or not-for-profit) which can take the intervention to scale, and lived experience experts.
They are open to different collaboration models. For example:
- The intervention may have been developed in a variety of settings, such as a:
- higher education institution
- research institute
- non-academic healthcare organisation
- non-governmental research organisation
- not-for-profit
The collaboration between organizations and researchers may be new or existing.
They expect:
- Researchers to serve as the analytical leads to design and deliver robust evaluations of the interventions. Researchers may be embedded in a company or a separate entity such as a higher education institution, research institute, non-academic healthcare organization, not-for-profit or non-governmental research organization based anywhere in the world (apart from mainland China).
The organization (not-for-profit or company) to serve (at least initially) as the implementation lead.