Just three months into the new academic year, and haven’t we been busy! We’ve wowed the crowd at our NPNR workshop, and consulted on three different projects.

We’re excited to be supporting Aysegul Dirik with her proposed project that looks at carer involvement in mental health inpatient settings, an ongoing partnership that we hope will really maximise the potential of the study to improve support for both service users and carers.

Professor Stefan Priebe, along with Dr Vanessa Pinfold and Dr Thomas Kabir from the McPin Foundation visited us in October to ask for our views and ideas about their proposal for a large project that aims to improve the social links of service users to their communities.

Yesterday, we heard from colleagues Dr Kathleen Mulligan and Dr Mark Haddad at City University London who hope that their proposed new survey of service users and staff, which complements an interview study funded by Barts Charity, will help healthcare professionals to develop their understanding of the issues around the self-management of diabetes in service users.

We also heard from PhD student Karen James about the findings from her study, which explored inpatient nursing staff views of self-harm and harm-minimisation practices. Karen consulted with SUGAR at the outset of her work and has kept in regular contact throughout.

As if that wasn’t enough for us to be getting on with, we’ve also been setting goals around our own development as a group, and developing our presentation skills. Phew! Bring on our Christmas lunch celebration – we seriously need to spend some time patting ourselves on the back for all of our hard work and achievements this year!