If you were following our Twitter feed last week, you’ll know that our coordinator Bea was out at BABCP – the annual conference of CBT practitioners. It was fantastic to see there’s a real emphasis on the importance of research in the psychological professions generally (that really made our little Incubator hearts sing!). BABCP was our first chance to promote mental health research opportunities with our shiny new poster, and we really enjoyed meeting practitioners who were interested in how they might get further involved in the research that underpins their professional practice. We’d love to be doing this for other professional groups too!
BABCP
At BABCP, practising therapists were able to hear about a wide range of developments in lots of different areas including condition-specific presentations, topics covering wider themes, cross-cultural working, and skills training workshops. The conference was a chance for practitioners to engage with emerging developments in their field, share their experience and make new connections, but it’s easy to forget that the research world can feel a little daunting to those who perhaps trained sometime ago.
It was great to encourage them!
We met practitioners who had initiated quality improvement projects in their service and it was great to be able to highlight the networks which could potentially support bigger projects on the themes that are important to them. We found ourselves demystifying the research world and encouraging researchers and practitioners to consider new opportunities.
Incubator Roadshow
Now we have our poster, we want to take it on a little roadtrip and roadshow. We are keen to help develop a more research-friendly culture in all the other mental health-related professional groups and organisations. Who’s in?
We want to support more people to get involved in mental health research projects, and get more early career researchers in this area involved with supporting each other. To do this we need to meet the people who are tackling mental health challenges in their day to day work – these will be people working in a variety of different fields. They might be: early career mental health researchers, AHPs, workers in local council, and anyone curious about mental health and how to get into researching it. We want to get beyond our bubble. This way we can support more, but also learn how we can support better.
Where should we go next?
Are you going to a conference or event that you think the Incubator should be represented at? Let us know of any opportunities either via Twitter or send us an email at mhresearch@psych.ox.ac.uk
You can see some other photos and information from the day on our Twitter feed, and on the BABCP Twitter feed here