London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

This module seeks to develop students with the skills and knowledge to design and evaluate mental health programmes. The focus of the module is on methods to design and evaluate mental health programmes, and the critical reflection of these approaches in terms of their strengths, limitations, and appropriateness. Key concepts such as formative research, pilot studies and definitive evaluations are taught in lectures, and these are consolidated by case studies and practical group exercises.

The overall module aim is to attract and work with students who are committed to integrating packages of care for mental disorders into routine platforms of care. For students taking the MSc in Global Mental Health, this module will provide an excellent foundation for the “Theory to Practice in Global Mental Health” module (run in term 3), as well as providing an excellent grounding in intervention development and evaluation for other students.

Intended learning outcomes

Upon successful completion of the module, a student will be able to: 

1. Know how to design a mental health intervention, considering design principles, intervention components and practical considerations (e.g. human resources, funding, and infrastructure).
2. Be fluent in the application strategies to evaluate the effectiveness of delivering a mental health intervention, from formative research plans to pilot and trial evaluations.
3. Engage in critical reflection of the strengths, limitations and appropriateness of approaches to research design and evaluation in global mental health.

Session Content

The module is expected to cover the following topics: 

Intended learning outcomes 1 

• Principles of designing and adapting mental health interventions in global mental health contexts.
• Resources (e.g. human, financial and other) required for design and evaluation of mental health interventions.

Intended learning outcomes 2 & 3 

• A series of case studies illustrating mental health interventions in a global mental health context (e.g. integrate packages of care for mental health conditions into other platforms of care, interventions in humanitarian contexts, mental health promotion approaches, using co-production approaches in intervention design and evaluation).
• Formative research and piloting to design a mental health programme.
• Evaluation of mental health programmes including effectiveness and process evaluations

Mode of delivery

This module is delivered predominantly face-to-face. Where specific teaching methods (lectures, seminars, discussion groups) are noted in this module specification these will be delivered by predominantly face-to-face sessions. There will be a combination of live and interactive activities (synchronous learning) as well as self-directed study (asynchronous learning).

Assessment

The assessment for this module has been designed to measure student learning against the module's intended learning outcomes (ILOs) as listed above. The grade for summative assessment(s) only will go towards the overall award GPA. 

For their summative assessment, students will be given a short answer question assessment based on the content of the Module. The assessment for this module will be online (submission via Moodle).

Credits

• CATS: 15
• ECTS: 7.5

Module specification

For full information regarding this module please see the module specification.