MCA: Informing the Mental Health Strategy for England

Mobilising Community Assets (MCA) recently submitted a response to the Government’s Mental Health Survey Informing the mental health strategy for England: call for evidence document - GOV.UK.

Our response showcased the impact of the MCA projects by demonstrating how local creative and participatory approaches can address a range of mental health conditions, and tackle health inequalities. Here’s what we shared……

To improve collaboration between mental health services and community organisations, MCA made recommendations to:

• Formalise cross-sector pathways: Establish defined multidisciplinary teams that integrate clinical and voluntary sectors.
• Embed community asset-based approaches: Integrate community-focused care into routine mental health and wellbeing practices.
• Expand creative health interventions: Incorporate creative health approaches into standard pathways, prioritising children and young people.
• Provide meaningful post-discharge support: Ensure individuals leaving secondary mental health care have access to community-based opportunities rather than relying solely on clinical follow-ups.

MCA identified several critical barriers to continuity of care across hospital and community services and different levels of care. These include:

• Service gaps: A lack of integrated, trauma-informed pathways connecting youth mental health and drug/alcohol services.
• Limited support networks: A lack of family, peer, and lived-experience support within statutory services.
• Age-related discontinuity: Abrupt interruptions in support when moving from children's to adult services, which exacerbate social exclusion and worsen health outcomes.

MCA recommends addressing these issues by:

• Embedding peer-led, community, and creative approaches into formal mental health pathways.
• Integrating social prescribing and community-based support directly into transition processes to maintain continuity of care.

For preventative approaches with the strongest evidence for reducing mental health problems and suicide rates, MCA recommends prioritising the following interventions:

• Housing stability: Ensuring safe, permanent accommodation to eliminate environmental stressors.
• Community asset-based support: Fostering local, neighbourhood-level resources and support networks.
• Co-design and integration: Developing holistic, integrated health approaches in partnership with people who have lived experience.
• Societal contribution: Encouraging active societal participation, such as through engagement with the VCSE sector.

While MCA research does not directly record suicide data, addressing the wider societal determinants of health remains essential to helping people manage severe mental illness and avoid crises.

To better support individuals whose sustained needs fall just below NHS mental health criteria, MCA recommends a more holistic approach. Key recommendations include:

• Embedding creative health: Integrating activities like art, sports, and gardening as a core part of standard support.
• Preventing crisis: Addressing issues like homelessness proactively, rather than waiting for people to reach a breaking point.
• Holistic care: Adopting creative health interventions, which evidence shows effectively address the multifaceted emotional, mental, and physical needs of individuals. Currently, these vital community assets are still not typically integrated into core statutory services.

To embed creative and community health into statutory care, MCA recommends integrating community assets across health systems. Key enablers include:

• Strategic alignment: Synchronising commissioning, infrastructure, and data systems.
• Data integration: Combining community-generated data with traditional health metrics to identify needs.
• Supportive infrastructure: Utilising population-level dashboards, shared datasets, and creative health consortia.
• Clinical governance: Ensuring these approaches are legitimate, sustainable, and clinically aligned.

Authors: Linda Thomson, Catherine Gilmore.

About Mobilising Community Assets

Mobilising Community Assets is a three-phase UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) funded Research Programme running from 2021 to 2027. It is coordinated by the Culture-Nature-Health Research Group at University College London, in partnership with the National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH) and funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), led by Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), with Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Medical Research Council (MRC). Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities (MCA) has encouraged the projects it has funded throughout the UK to share knowledge and approaches to integration of community assets into the integrated care structures that exist in the local communities.