This new edition of the Mental
Well-being Impact Assessment (MWIA) toolkit has been published by the National Mental
Health Development Unit in partnership with the English National MWIA Collaborative.
Improving population mental
health and well-being will be a key theme in the Government's
forthcoming Mental Health Strategy and the Public Health White Paper. The toolkit helps support national, regional and local services
and systems across health, local government, the voluntary, community and
private sector to embed mental well-being into their work. This version builds
on the earlier MWIA Toolkit published in 2007.
As before, we have made it as practical as possible
with full instructions and resources to be used and adapted for your
requirements. The Toolkit is presented in downloadable sections. The main new
additions are:
- a significantly strengthened evidence base on the population characteristics, determinants and protective factors for mental wellbeing
- a greater emphasis on social determinants of mental well-being such as socio-economic position, environment, transport, education, food, and the understanding of resilience, core economy, social justice and equity
- a refined and more user-friendly process for undertaking a Mental Wellbeing Impact Assessment
- a revised section on measuring mental well-being with practical explanations of how to identify suitable indicators for your proposal
- an improved set of resources including an extensive mental well-being bibliography.
NMHDU is supporting the dissemination of the toolkit and adoption of best practice in MWIA through a national capacity building programme in 2010/11. Details of the programme can be found here
Recently, NMHDU also launched a Mental Well-being Checklist which can be downloaded from here
This is a simple and easy to use guide that helps the reader become
more familiar with the major influences on mental well-being and provides a
quick reference source to help with local improvements and actions as part
of local commissioning, development, review, delivery or evaluation.