Mental health outcomes and utilization of mental health care services in ageing adults in primary care
What are we trying to do?
We want to find out about the mental health needs of older adults in England and how mental health services are being accessed by this group of people.
To do this, we’ll look at:
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How access to mental health changes for individual patients over time.
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How the NHS Mental Health Implementation Plan has changed older people’s access to mental health services from 2019-2024 at a GP practice level, compared to the previous five years.
Why is this important?
The NHS Mental Health Implementation Plan and NHS Long-Term Plan both show that older adults are less likely to be offered psychological therapies than other groups of patients. But, when older people take medications to manage anxiety and depression, it can cause other issues, such as an increased risk of falls.
One of the NHS Long-Term Plan’s key goals is making sure all patients have equal access to care, regardless of age, so it’s important to work towards older adults being equally offered, and able to receive, psychological therapy.
The findings from this study will help to plan future health care services for ageing adults that are both equal (the same access to services) and equitable (taking into account older people’s circumstances to help them to reach an equal outcome).
How are we doing it?
We will use Electronic Health Records (EHR) to explore older adults’ levels of depression and anxiety over time based on:
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Age
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Sex
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Alcohol consumption
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Menopause
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Frailty status
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Home region
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Ethnicity
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Socio-economic factors in the home region
We will also interview GPs and patients who receive or provide care for mental health to find out what they think stops people from accessing mental health care, and what they believe would allow more patients to access these services.
Who are we working with?
The Principal Investigator for this study is Dr Rathi Ravindrarajah from NIHR ARC-GM.
We are also working with:
Funding information
This project is funded from 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2026 by the NIHR School for Primary Care Research (SPCR).
More information
Programme Manager
Gill Rizzello
gill.rizzello@manchester.ac.uk