Supporting employers and their employees with Mental hEalth problems to remain eNgaged and producTive at wORk (MENTOR): A feasibility randomised controlled trial protocol

Prudenzi, Arianna; Jadhakhan, Feroz; Gill, Kiranpreet; MacArthur, Michael; Patel, Krishane; Moukhtarian, Talar; Kershaw, Charlotte; Norton-Brown, Errin; Johnston, Naomi; Daly, Guy; Russell, Sean; Thomson, Louise; Munir, Fehmidah; Blake, Holly; Meyer, Caroline; Marwaha, Steven

Abstract

Employees with mental health problems often struggle to remain in employment. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these employees face multiple additional stressors, which are likely to worsen their mental health and work productivity. Currently, it is unclear how to best support employees with mental health problems (and their managers) to improve wellbeing and productivity. We aim to develop a new intervention (MENTOR) that will jointly involve employees, managers, and a new professional (mental health employment liaison worker, MHELW), to help employees who are still at work with a mental health condition and currently receiving professional support for their mental health. A feasibility pilot study will then be undertaken to examine the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention from the perspective of employees and line managers. The study involves a feasibility randomised controlled study comparing outcomes of participants randomised to receive the intervention (MENTOR) with wait-list controls. Participants allocated to the waitlist control group will receive the intervention after three months. We aim to randomise 56 employee-manager pairs recruited from multiple organisations in the Midlands region of England. An intervention including 10 sessions for employees and managers (3 individual sessions and 4 joint sessions) will be delivered over 12 weeks by trained MHELWs. Primary outcomes include measures of feasibility and acceptability of the intervention and work productivity. Secondary outcomes include mental health outcomes. Qualitative interviews will be undertaken with a purposively selected sub-sample of employees and line managers at three-month post-intervention assessment. To our knowledge, this will be the first trial with a joint employee-manager intervention delivered by MHELWs. Anticipated challenges are dual-level consent (employees and managers), participants’ attrition, and recruitment strategies. If the intervention and trial processes are shown to be feasible and acceptable, the outcomes from this study will inform future randomised controlled trials. Trial registration: This trial is pre-registered with the ISRCTN registry, registration number: ISRCTN79256498. Protocol version: 3.0_March_2023. https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN79256498.

Citation

Prudenzi, A., Jadhakhan, F., Gill, K., MacArthur, M., Patel, K., Moukhtarian, T., …Marwaha, S. (2023). Supporting employers and their employees with Mental hEalth problems to remain eNgaged and producTive at wORk (MENTOR): A feasibility randomised controlled trial protocol. PLoS ONE, 18(4), Article e0283598. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283598

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 2, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Apr 20, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023-04
• Deposit Date: May 19, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: May 19, 2023
• Journal: PLoS ONE
• Electronic ISSN: 1932-6203
• Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 4
• Article Number: e0283598
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283598
• Keywords: Study Protocol, Social sciences, Medicine and health sciences, Research and analysis methods, Biology and life sciences, Computer and information sciences
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/19993296
• Publisher URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0283598
• Additional Information: © 2023 Prudenzi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.