Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Over a 1-year period we will bring together a national network of stakeholders involved in the lives of people with severe mental illness (SMI; bipolar disorder and schizophrenia) focusing specifically on identifying key research priorities for improving primary care and reducing preventable early mortality. There is a health crisis among people with SMI, who die 10-25 years sooner than people without these conditions and who have not had the same decline in mortality over the past decades that the general population has experienced. This major health equity problem requires urgent specific attention. To do this, we are going to engage people with lived experience, carers, and clinicians to discuss their experiences and to co-create research priorities. Some prior work has been performed to identify research priorities for specific SMI conditions, in other countries. However, those have been more narrowly focused on specialty care and have not addressed what can be done in the primary care setting, where primary and secondary prevention of key contributors to early mortality takes place. By combining knowledge gained from an online survey and a virtual national discussion, we will develop a 'Primary Care and Severe Mental Illness Research Priorities Blueprint' to be widely disseminated to stakeholders. We will then be able to leverage the network of interested people to develop a future grant application to address these important priorities, to reduce preventable mortality among people with SMI.