NEST-Care · NEST–care: meNtal hEalthcare Service neTworking solutions

NEST–care: meNtal hEalthcare Service neTworking solutions

Health and social care systems across Europe are facing increasing pressure due to rising mental health needs, growing social inequalities, and the complexity of coordinating care across multiple services and professional roles. In many contexts, individuals with mental health needs interact with a wide range of actors, including primary care providers, specialised services, social workers, and community organisations. While this diversity of support has the potential to improve care, fragmentation and weak coordination often limit its effectiveness, leading to unequal access, inefficiencies, and unmet needs. This project was developed in response to the growing recognition that improving mental health care requires not only new services or resources, but also a better understanding of how professionals, organisations, and sectors interact in practice. Current policy frameworks at European and national levels increasingly emphasise integrated, community-based, and person-centred care. However, there remains a gap between these strategic objectives and the day-to-day realities of service delivery, particularly regarding how collaboration is organised, sustained, and experienced on the ground. The overall objective of the project is to generate actionable knowledge on how patterns of collaboration among health and social care professionals shape the integration, accessibility, and equity of mental health services. Rather than focusing solely on individual services or outcomes, the project examines care as a relational system, where interactions, information flows, and informal coordination play a central role. By analysing these relational dynamics, the project aims to identify structural strengths, gaps, and opportunities for improvement within existing service networks. The project follows a pathway to impact that combines empirical research, stakeholder engagement, and knowledge co-production. Data are collected directly from professionals involved in mental health care using participatory and co-design approaches, ensuring that the research captures real-world practices and constraints. This emphasis on co-design responds to the practical challenge that health professionals often work under time pressure and organisational constraints, which can limit the feasibility of traditional top-down research or policy interventions. By actively involving practitioners, the project seeks to produce findings that are both scientifically robust and practically relevant. A central ambition of the project is to support evidence-informed decision-making for service planning and governance. The results are expected to help identify where coordination is strong, where it breaks down, and how collaboration could be strengthened to improve continuity of care. In the medium to long term, this knowledge can contribute to more integrated service models, reduced duplication of efforts, and improved experiences for both service users and professionals. The project is grounded in the integration of social sciences and humanities, particularly sociology, social network research, and qualitative inquiry. These disciplines play a key role in understanding how institutional structures, professional cultures, power relations, and everyday practices influence collaboration and service delivery. By combining relational analysis with interpretative insights from the social sciences, the project moves beyond purely technical or organisational solutions and highlights the social processes that underpin effective care systems. At a broader scale, the project contributes to ongoing European efforts to strengthen mental health systems, reduce health inequalities, and promote socially sustainable models of care. Its findings are relevant not only for local service improvement, but also for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners interested in scalable approaches to integrated care. Through dissemination activities and dialogue with stakeholders, the project aims to ensure that its results are accessible, transferable, and capable of informing future initiatives in mental health and beyond.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз