RE-DEFINE group during the mid-term meeting in Geneva at the WHO headquarter building.
On 4 and 5 February 2019 all RE-DEFINE partners met in Geneva for the second consortium meeting of the project. The meeting was hosted by the World Health Organization.
The project started in January 2018, and the first of three phases of the project has been completed. SH+ was translated and contextually adapted to the needs of the refugees and asylum seekers participating in the programme. A situational assessment was carried out to identify migration flows across different countries inside and outside Europe and local needs in relation to these elements.
Then the SH+ programme was translated into three languages according to the situational assessment and adapted to the relevant cultures. This phase is strongly interdisciplinary because it relies on ethnographic input from the different partners as well as stakeholders.
The aim of the meeting was primarily to plan and coordinate the upcoming second phase of the project. During this phase two large, pragmatic randomized control trials (RCT) will be carried out to evaluate cost-effectiveness and acceptability of SH+ programme.
The trials will test the capacity of the SH+ programme to be implemented within mental health systems in terms of reduction of psychological distress, disability and health costs. In all the participating countries, beneficiaries will be adult refugees and asylum seekers who show increased psychological distress but no mental disorder. The SH+ programme will be delivered by trained non-specialist facilitators/cultural mediators with a refugee or migrant background or with the same/similar culture.
The main objective of the health economic evaluation is to determine whether implementation of the SH+ programme reduces economic burden of common mental health symptoms in refugees and asylum seekers.
About the project:
RE-DEFINE is a scientific research study, financed by the European Union with the aim to test the effectiveness of an innovative psychological intervention for preventing the onset of mental disorders in asylum seekers and refugees with psychological distress resettled in middle-income and high-income countries.
The people behind RE-FEFINE (see pictures below) are a group of mental health experts with different backgrounds from 8 different European countries and Turkey with a special interest in refugees and asylum seekers with psychological distress resettled in middle-income and high-income countries.
