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Research paper of the year award for Peter Coventry

Posted on 4 October 2016

The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) has named a research study led by Dr Peter Coventry (Mental Health and Addiction Research Group) Research Paper of the Year in the neurology, mental health and dementia category.

A research study, led by Dr Peter Coventry, has been named Research Paper of the Year by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP).

The award in the neurology, mental health and dementia category recognises an individual or group of researchers who have published an exceptional piece of research relating to general practice or primary care.

Dr Coventry is a Senior Lecturer in Health Services Research and member of the Department of Health Sciences' Mental Health and Addiction research group and the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination.

He explained that bringing physical and mental healthcare together is a priority in the NHS, especially in primary care where most people with long term physical conditions (e.g. diabetes) and common mental health problems are seen. "People with depression and long term conditions have poorer health and do worse than people with single conditions, but their needs are not well met in primary care," he said. 

His study entitled: ‘Managing depression in people with multimorbidity: a qualitative evaluation of an integrated collaborative care model’, was published in the journal BMC Family Practice and explores whether an enhanced model of collaborative care can potentially achieve ‘joined-up’ care in the NHS by supporting health professionals to treat both mental and physical health together.

Findings reported in the paper showed that collaborative care can bring about more coordinated care but patients didn’t necessarily endorse the idea that therapies had to be delivered in an integrated way. Instead they often preferred to discuss mental health in a protected and separate space away from routine management of long term conditions. This work underlines the importance of service user experience in developing services that seek to integrate physical and mental health care.

Principal investigator Dr Coventry and co-author Professor Carolyn Chew-Graham (Research Institute, Primary Care and Health Sciences, Keele University) accepted their prize for winning the award at a ceremony at Stationers’ Hall in London on 28 September 2016 (pictured above).