On the following pages you will find guidance on how to complete…

Question On the following pages you will find guidance on how to complete… On the following pages you will find guidance on how to complete this assignment.The task: Report and reflexive review Please be aware that the regulations on word limits and deadlines for EMAs are different to those for TMAs. Check the EMA guidance below, and in the module Assessment guidance, carefully.    The scenario you should base your  Report on is: This exercise requires that you put yourself in the position of someone who works for an organisation that has experience of providing mental health services to the town of ‘Middleton’. A national charity has identified Middleton as an area that suffers from high levels of mental health distress; it has been noted that there are significant rates of depression and anxiety. The town is ethnically diverse and has also recently witnessed increases in unemployment, as it has been badly hit economically by Covid-19 disruption. The national charity is willing to fund local organisations such as yours to provide new services that will ameliorate the problems.You are asked to provide a justification for receiving funding for the services that you would like to provide. Your organisation takes a service user-led, collaborative approach, meaning that all services are co-produced by professionals and people who have experience of using mental health services. Both professionals and service users are represented in the leadership of the service. Your service seeks funding to provide interventions at two levels:Individual psychotherapy where clients can self-refer or they might be referred by another agency.Activism and campaigning within the community. This might involve campaigning and working with the local community on issues that have been identified as significant to mental health, such as social cohesion, inequality and racism.You are required to deliver a report that presents an outline of the interventions that you would like to provide and a justification for their provision.You have been informed that the people reading and assessing the report are not experts in mental health or psychology. They want to understand the reasons behind each of these interventions, and the evidence that exists to support the approach.Student notes The following notes provide guidance on how to write Part 1 of your assignment and explain how it will be marked.In addition to these notes, the module team have provided you with the Assessment marking grid  which sets out how your work will be assessed for all assignments. Marking grids are used by the e-marker to grade your EMA. They are therefore useful tools for you to use as they clearly explain what the marker will be looking for. You should use this feedback to help you improve your work when you complete any future assignments. If you feel at all uncertain about how to work with any part of these notes, consult your own tutor for advice. Writing your assignmentThis section provides guidance on how to approach your assignment – what the assignment is asking you to do and what you need to consider in order to provide a good answer. You are being asked to write a report that provides a justification for the planned mental health services. The key process word here is therefore ‘justification’ – or ‘justify’. This means that you need to provide evidence and arguments that support the claims you make about the interventions that your service wishes to provide.The important content words are ‘mental health distress’ and the ‘interventions’ that are designed to improve ‘mental health’. You are told that levels of depression and anxiety are particularly high. So you will need to demonstrate some awareness of the debates about the nature of these difficulties and what relieving them might mean. Remember there might be different perspectives on this – there might be differences between the point of view of the people who may be seen as having difficulties and those of the community. You will need to write in a balanced way that demonstrates your ability to evaluate evidence and arguments, and show awareness of counter-evidence and counter-arguments.StructureThe report should have the following structure (the word lengths should be used as a guide):Introduction:This should briefly explain the background to the report, and summarise its important points, including a brief rationale and purpose of the interventions that would be provided.A service user-led approach:This section should provide a justification for why your organisation seeks to take a service user-led approach and what can be gained from this way of working. A good answer will show critical awareness of the significance of the service-user movement and some of the key criticisms that have been made of mental health service delivery. It will include awareness of the ethical and practical advantages of service-user involvement alongside some of the potential obstacles and difficulties that can be encountered. Individual therapy: justifying using the individual modalityHere you need to briefly describe the nature of the first intervention which is a form of individual psychotherapy. You should choose one of the treatment modalities that you have focused on in the module. You should select either a CBT, OR a psychodynamic, OR a person-centred/humanistic approach. You should justify the use of the approach by referring to relevant literature. You will need to demonstrate critical engagement with relevant theory and research evidence to back up the claims that you are making. You should avoid spending too much time describing the intervention as higher marks will be awarded for explaining concepts and using research evidence to back up your claims. Community activism/campaigning: an intervention that supports community campaigning or a community-based mental health initiative and the justification for thisYou need to briefly describe the intervention – what it is and what it aims to do. You will need to use relevant literature and research evidence to justify the approach. You need to explain the rationale of a community-level intervention and why you believe that it would work, and the expected impact of taking this approach on mental health. You might want to focus on a particular issue, such as social cohesion, inequality or racism. As in the earlier section on the individual intervention, you should avoid spending too much time describing the intervention as higher marks will be awarded for provision of theory and evidence that provide the rationale for the intervention. The rationale might include the positive impact on the mental health of individuals suffering from distress, but might also include the benefits to the community (such as a reduction in crime, for example).An example of an intervention that supports community-level campaigning would be provision of support, advice, facilities and resources for a peer-led group campaigning to improve a particular issue in the area (such as poor employment prospects for young people locally or the lack of support for families with young children).An example of a community-led mental health initiative would be a weekly ‘coffee morning’ peer-led group with a crèche supporting parents of under-fives where the parent is experiencing depression.Examples of campaigns that are aimed at the wider community might be those that aimed to: draw attention to the impact of poverty and sought to reduce poverty in the area, or strengthen social cohesion, or enhance the capacity of the community itself to provide support for its members, or reduce levels of stigma.Conclusion: summarise the main arguments for the approaches that you haveApproaching the taskAn important element of writing this part of the EMA is to remember your audience and write appropriately for them. Your audience has been identified as non-academic, so you should not assume familiarity with psychological concepts, theories or terminology. If you use specialist terminology you should define the term first. You should also use a format that is appropriate for a report, presenting your material in an appropriate style and using the structure outlined above so that it is clear and concise.You may use sub-headings. You can use non-textual elements if they help to convey your points, such as tables, graphs, figures or diagrams. However, words associated with figures will count towards the word count, so do make sure that any such elements serve a useful function in your report: do not include them just for the sake of it. The highest marks will still be possible for reports which don’t use them. If you use non-textual elements, make sure you put them in the main body of your report (not in an appendix) and explain and reference them sufficiently in the text.For good marks you should draw on material from across the module, so when selecting which material to cover make sure you demonstrate a breadth of knowledge (e.g. don’t draw exclusively, or very heavily, on just one topic, no matter how interesting you find it).You should also draw on at least two additional sources of material that you have found through independent study to help illustrate your points. These might be recent research papers that you might have found through the Open University Library, for example. However, you should make sure that you use these to support points that are based on examples from within the module, rather than introducing entirely new topics or areas.  Biology Science Physiology D 241 Share QuestionEmailCopy link Comments (0)