About

Community of practice

Network members will be able to join regular ‘community of practice’ sessions, offering an open space for cross sector connections and peer learning opportunities, sharing common challenges and workshopping new possibilities and ideas. These will usually involve some time for individual and group reflections, as well as open discussions led by members, and will help shape the detail and direction of the network activities.

Our next community of practice will be on Wednesday 6 December 11 - 12.30pm.

Join our network mailing list to receive an invitation and find out more about how to get involved!

participatory ethics

Emerging from conversations amongst the ethics working group around what a ‘utopian ethics’ process would look like when communities lead research, the network is developing a new ‘participatory ethics’ toolkit, exploring the nuances around how people might like to be asked questions about mental health and wellbeing and research more widely. Rather than creating a definitive guide to ethics processes for co-produced research, this participatory ethics process will instead offer a method of increasing community involvement in shaping the very decisions around ethics processes that affect them. By encouraging communities to think about the terms of engagement with research that feel most appropriate for them, the network seeks to explore the idea of ethics as a rights based approach that can be used to empower communities and researchers alike. 

To find out more about our participatory ethics process, or to enquire about our ethics working group, please get in touch.

consultation mapping and engagement

Conversations with community stakeholders as well as those within the public health and social care working group have highlighted the prominence of ‘consultation fatigue’ and the significantly reduced capacity (or desire) amongst community groups to engage with consultation processes around mental health & wellbeing, despite – and sometimes because of – a growing sense of not being listened to.

As such, the network has started a process of ‘consultation mapping’, identifying the existing examples of consultations, surveys, and research around mental health and wellbeing across the Highlands & Islands. By doing so, the network aims to not only learn from the findings of existing research and consultations – creating a literature review of sorts – but also plans to explore which methods of consultation communities feel most heard by and included in.

At a time when the Scottish Government is seeking to widen the participation of communities in helping shape the policies that affect them, this network will examine head on what mechanisms could be put in place to make this more possible. 

To find out more about our work around consultations, and to hear about the public health & social care working group, please get in touch!

co-priority setting survey

Following the work around participatory ethics and consultation mapping & engagement, the network will conduct its own co-priority survey in 2024, exploring the priorities around mental health and wellbeing across the Highlands & Islands, as well as gathering thoughts around how communities and researchers could work better together to support mental wellbeing. This will be developed and delivered in collaboration with Professor Sarah-Anne Munoz from the University of the Highlands and Islands, and the results will help inform the writing of a new collaborative international position paper on rural mental health research with colleagues from Australia, USA, Ireland and Sweden.