Completed Mental Health NIHR-supported project Public Health & Healthcare

Emergency Care After Self-Harm: Patient and Public Contributors' Experience of Evidence Synthesis

Funder NIHR (part of DHSC)
Recipient organisation NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Yorkshire and Humber
NIHR support Recorded as supported by this research centre
Period Mar 2025 — Mar 2026

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

People who have harmed themselves often face emergency care that can either help or harm their recovery, yet researchers rarely ask these patients what they actually experienced from first responders. This matters because evidence reviews on emergency care after self-harm typically focus on clinical outcomes—waiting times, treatments, readmission rates—while ignoring how patients themselves felt about the care they received. Without that perspective, guidelines and training for paramedics, A&E staff, and crisis teams may miss what matters most to the people they are trying to help. The research team at York is now running a small “add-on” study alongside their main evidence review. They will interview six to eight patient and public contributors—including a young adult with lived experience—who are helping shape the review’s questions and outputs. Through short audio-recorded interviews and written reflections, the team will capture what these contributors found valuable, what barriers they faced, and how the process could improve. If this succeeds, it will show funders and researchers a practical method for genuinely incorporating patient voices into evidence synthesis—not as a tick-box exercise, but as a way to make research more relevant and impactful for the people who use emergency services after self-harm.

View original technical description
The York Evidence Synthesis Group is conducting a mixed method review of emergency care following an episode of self-harm. The aim is to review existing evidence of (emergency care) users experiences of first responders. Part of the project will involve working with multiple patient and public (PPI) contributors, to ensure the review is asking the right research questions, that the outcomes are appropriate and that the evidence is used to have impact. Some PPI contributors may also be involved in analysis and paper writing. These contributors will include mental health advisory group members from York’s Council for Volunteer Services (CVS) and at least one young adult with lived experience. We will capture their experiences of being involved in the evidence synthesis project via short-form interviews and written reflective contributions. This is essentially an ‘add-on’ study to the main evidence synthesis project. We will record the experiences of patient and public (PPI) contributors involved in this self-harm evidence synthesis project as research advisors. We will invite the PPI contributors to take part in up to three brief audio-recorded interviews (15 – 30 minutes) and ask them to write a short reflective account of their experiences. We anticipate between six and eight PPI contributors taking part in this ‘add-on’ study as research participants. We are interested in whether they find being involved in research valuable, what they have learned, any barriers or challenges encountered and how the involvement/consultation process could be improved.

Researchers

Ruth Wadman (Principal Investigator)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Emergency care following an episode of self-harm: a mixed methods review of user experiences and the nature and impact of knowledge, attitudes and behaviours of first responders
Emergency Care After Self-Harm (EmCASH): what works for young people, why, and in what circumstances?
The ‘Listen-Up!’ Project: Understanding and Helping Looked-After Young People Who Self-Harm
Self-harm in primary care patients: a nationally representative cohort study examining patterns of attendance, treatment and referral, and risk of self-harm repetition, suicide and other causes of premature death
ASsuRED: Improving outcomes in patients who self-harm - Adapting and evaluating a brief pSychological inteRvention in Emergency Departments

Original classification

Mental and Physical Multimorbidity

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