Research Forum 2025

On Tuesday, 25 February 2025 we hosted our annual Research Forum. This event is our opportunity to connect with Trust staff, university colleagues, and service users about the research we have been doing in the previous year.

This year we held the event at The Bridge Conference Centre, a venue that the Trust uses often and a venue that our service users, Trust members, Trust staff and local community have become familiar with.

The event saw a range of presentations from the use of ‘Sertraline for Anxiety in People with a Diagnosis of Autism’, Building Better Gender-Affirming Research’, DIAMONDS URDU – Understanding Reach and Delivery in Urdu’ and many more. It was encouraging to see speakers from a range of professional backgrounds and the thread of co-production through all the studies presented. One delegate said:

“A well curated theme of coproduction, Trust and inclusion and importance of investing in relationships. Really relevant to my job role, lots of learning to take back to my team.”

This year we decided to run three workshops simultaneously. The workshops were delivered by Trust staff and focused on ‘Facilitated Networking’, Disseminating differently: how to accessibly share research findings’, and ‘Improving skills and knowledge of our patient facing staff’. We found that this part of the day was rushed and will look into the timings next year but comments received on the workshops were very positive:

“The workshop was interactive and provided the opportunity to think of ways to get involved, and followed up with a actions to take.”

“All speakers were engaging and wanted to share ideas and discuss.”

“I really enjoyed my workshop I think the facilitators did a wonderful job of showing different dissemination styles and including activities.”

We featured a good number of posters on the day including some excellent posters from students on our ‘Research Ready Schools programme’. The programme is an introduction to research year four children. We hope that by involving children in research from a young age, we can breakdown stigma around mental health and help empower them to take an active role in their own and others mental health and wellbeing.

As always delegates voted for their favourites and we presented first prize to the children at Boroughbridge Primary school (Research Ready Schools programme) looking at ‘Do sweets help children with their schoolwork?’ and second prize went to Aziz Aldaughaither looking at ‘Impact of Age of Autism Diagnosis on Wellbeing: A Narrative Review & Analysis of Service User Data’.