Self-harm and suicidal thoughts and behaviours are a significant public health concern. While individual risk factors have been widely studied, the role of social determinants in shaping these outcomes remains underexplored within policy contexts. This Rapid Realist Policy Review aims to investigate how macro level (national) policies in England address the impact of social determinants of self-harm and suicidal thoughts and behaviours.
This Rapid Realist Policy Review adapts the rapid realist review method to place policy documents at the centre of analysis. It will identify and extract relevant English policy documents (2002–2023) related to suicide, self-harm and mental health, using government and archival databases.
Policy documents will be mapped and categorised based on their pertinence to proximal and distal outcomes and social determinants. A predefined template will be used to extract and appraise data based on relevance, richness and rigour. Context-mechanism-outcome configurations will be developed, validated by content experts and synthesised into an initial programme theory. The review will follow Realist And Meta-narrative Evidence Syntheses: Evolving Standards for realist syntheses.
This review does not require ethical approval due to the use of secondary sources. Findings will be disseminated via an open-access, peer-reviewed journal article. A summary of key recommendations will be produced with the expert stakeholder group to inform policy and practice.
CRD420251057759.
by Caitlin D. October, Dzunisani P. Baloyi, Lario Viljoen, Rene Raad, Dillon T. Wademan, Megan Palmer, Juli Switala, Michaile G. Anthony, Karen Du Preez, Petra De Koker, Anneke C. Hesseling, Bronwyne Coetzee, Graeme Hoddinott
Children who are hospitalised for tuberculosis (TB) experience challenges that put them at risk of developing emotional, behavioural, and social difficulties. In this methodological paper, we showcase the development of a narrative intervention toolkit with key components of the resulting version 1.0 tool. The study design was participatory and pragmatic, with researchers working with the routine staff of TB hospital wards, children admitted and their caregivers, to iteratively understand and improve children’s experiences of hospitalisation. The project included three phases: (1) a situational analysis to map children and healthcare providers’ perspectives on priorities and potential intervention components, (2) co-development of a beta-version of the intervention, and (3) piloting and incremental refinement toward a version 1.0 of the intervention. The intervention toolkit combined a series of activities alongside the story of ‘Courageous Curly’ to facilitate children’s engagement with their own experiences of hospitalisation, including psychosocial and treatment challenges, captured, and described throughout data collection. We found that dividing the story into short chapters facilitated children’s engagement with the section of story that is being told on a specific day. Each chapter of the story follows/mimics a different stage children can expect during their treatment journey while hospitalised for TB care. Implementation and evaluation of such interventions can mitigate the psychosocial impact of TB in children and inform policies to improve their overall TB care.