Ethnic Minority/ Global Majority Groups

GRT Projects

Project Titles

Crossing boundaries: exploring effective approaches to co-design mental health support with Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities

Hidden troubles: exploring suicide risk and prevention with Gypsy and Traveller communities

What we’re doing, and why:

Hidden Troubles and Crossing Boundaries are a pair of NIHR funded research studies running from 2024-2026, looking at perceptions and experiences of mental health, suicide prevention, and what ‘good’ help looks like for people in Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. 

People in Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities are among the most health disadvantaged in the country, even by comparison to other disadvantaged groups. As the communities are often ‘hidden in plain sight’ because of issues of mistrust and discrimination, a lot of what we know is based on partial information and anecdotal information from practice, but evidence suggests that there are high rates of anxiety and depression and a higher likelihood of suicide than in the wider population.

Our projects aimed to build understanding of how communities understood these experiences, what contributed to their experiences, how to build on community strengths and what ‘good’ help might look like.

How we’re doing it:

We’ve reached out to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities across Yorkshire and the North East to invite people to take part in one-to-one unstructured interviews, community outreach sessions or activity-focused consultations. Within these sessions, conversation is introduced around three key areas: nature and causes of mental distress, what made help ‘good’, and proposed solutions. Participants lead the discussions, supported by researchers, to focus on community priorities. Data are collected through fieldnotes for analysis using reflexive thematic analysis, which will be workshopped with community members to check relevance.

Research Inclusion: Coproduction with people from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities

People from Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities can be mistrustful of ‘the state’ (including research), linked to previous experiences of mistreatment and discrimination, concern about what will be done with the information they provide, and scepticism that nothing will change. To counter this, our projects were codesigned from the outset, working with two organisations that support a combination of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. 

Our research team includes two community members who have taken lead roles in guiding the research, and our ‘on the ground’ research team has included people from English Romany, European Roma, and Irish Traveller communities as well as academic researchers. The wider community were involved in planning discussions through these connections, as we established a group of peer researchers who have supported us in research design, recruitment, data collection, analysis and impact planning.

Team

Our research team is led by Laura Tucker (University of York) and Violet Cannon (York Travellers Trust) and includes community practitioners from York Travellers Trust and Waythrough, academics from York, Northumbria and Bristol, NHS representatives from Tees, Esk and Wear Valley NHS Trust and community members from across Yorkshire and the Northeast.

Find out more on the study websites:

Crossing boundaries: exploring effective approaches to co-design mental health support with Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities

Hidden troubles: exploring suicide risk and prevention with Gypsy and Traveller communities

Image from one of our activity focused consultation events (October 2025) 

The SERPENT project

Project title

SERPENT: Skills and Essentials Required to ParticipatE iN the digiTal world

What we’re doing

This project aims to understand what matters to people with serious mental illness (SMI) who are from culturally diverse or ethnic minority backgrounds when learning digital skills.

We intend to find out what’s important when learning digital skills, and the opportunities and challenges of using online digital courses.

Using co-production we will explore how training and resources can be tailored to be culturally relevant, supportive and useful.  

How we’re doing it

Timeframe: 1 September 2025 to 31 March 2026 (7 months)

Series of workshops: People with lived experience of severe mental illness from culturally diverse backgrounds in partnership with Sheffield Flourish (https://sheffieldflourish.co.uk/)

Outputs and Future Plans: Co-designed guidelines and recommendations to inform the development of a future online digital skills course. Develop a future grant application

Research inclusion: Embedding ethnic minority inclusion in a co-production RCF project

People with SMI are more likely than the general population to be subjected to the ‘digital divide,’ defined as lack of access to digital technology or the skills or motivation to use it (Spanakis et al. 2021). Despite evidence from our previous work (Dragon, 2023) which showed that providing tailored support to people with SMI, to use freely available online digital skills courses (https://www.goodthingsfoundation.org/learn/learn-my-way), enabled them to develop foundational skills, the courses were not culturally diverse. The SERPENT project addresses this gap through co-production with people from a range of ethnic minority groups. By collaborating with community organisations such as Sheffield Flourish, the team aims to build long-term trust and ensure meaningful involvement of underserved ethnic minority communities, who are disproportionately affected by digital exclusion.

Project Objectives

* Understand User Needs: Explore the specific preferences, priorities, and digital capabilities of adults with SMI from diverse cultural backgrounds.

* Identify Barriers & Facilitators: Determine what hinders or enables the delivery of digital skills interventions in these communities.

* Assess Impacts on Health: Consider how co-produced tools impact digital health literacy, use of the NHS App, and health-seeking behaviour.

* Inform Future Research: Use these insights to develop and trial culturally appropriate digital inclusion tools through future funding applications.

By embedding inclusion directly into the research framework, SERPENT aims to move beyond ‘one-size-fits-all’ digital resources, creating guidance that is bespoke and culturally resonant.

Team

The core SERPENT team comprises researchers from the Mental Health and Addiction Research Group in the Department of Health Sciences, University of York. Joint PIs, Dr Kate Bosanquet and Dr Trish Darcy, are collaborating with community partners Dr Josie Soutar (Managing Director) and Lisa Thompson-Cox (Community Engagement & Volunteer Coordinator) at Sheffield Flourish. Other contributors include Dr Raihan Talukdar (Consultant Psychiatrist & Chief Clinical Information Officer) and Fiona Czarnecki (Senior Business Architect) at Sheffield Health Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust.                     

Funder information: This study is funded by Sheffield Health Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (RCF) and the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Yorkshire Humber.

The TRUST Study

Project title

Enhancing Gypsy, Roma and Traveller peoples’ trust: using maternity and early years’ health services and dental health services as exemplars of mainstream service provision

What we aimed to do

People who identify as Gypsy, Roma and Travellers (GRT) are a marginalised and socially excluded group. Despite the fact that GRT people constitute a significant minority group in the UK, at the time the TRUST project was undertaken, the evidence base for improving health and access to services within the GRT population was weak.

We aimed to investigate which approaches to community engagement are likely to enhance trust between GRT people and mainstream health services.

How we did it

We conducted a multi-component study that aimed to strengthen the evidence regarding how to improve uptake and delivery of health services and thereby reduce health inequalities for GRT people. The study comprised:

Stage 1: literature reviews to understand GRT engagement with health services, the concept of trust in healthcare settings, and engagement strategies for GRT people in health services.

Stage 2: semi-structured, online consultation to gather views on trust and engagement in health services for GRT people.

Stage 3: case studies to generate in-depth, multi-faceted understanding of the complex issues surrounding enhancing trust and engagement between mainstream health services and GRT communities in their real-life context.

Stage 4: two in person cross-sectoral workshops and a teleconference to sense check study findings and to develop recommendations for policy. Economic evaluation of providing health care interventions to improve accessibility of NHS services by and for GRT communities.

Research inclusion: Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities

In this project we worked closely with GRT people, organisations and health care professionals that support GRT.

Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) was central to the conception, design, conduct and interpretation. Four strategies were employed:

1. The team included the CEO of Leeds Gypsy and Traveller Exchange, a community members’ organisation that works to improve the lives of Gypsies and Travellers in West Yorkshire and beyond.
2. A User Advisory Group comprising women representing the Romany Gypsy, Irish Traveller and Eastern European Roma communities met four times during the study and advised on the conduct of the study as well as interpretation and dissemination.
3. We held two advocacy training workshops to support the User Advisory Group and the wider GRT community to participate in research.
4. We included individuals from third sector organisations who represented and advocated for GRT communities in the online consultation, the case studies, and the Stakeholder workshops.

Team

The TRUST team comprised researchers from the University of Dundee: Professor Alison McFadden, Dr Lindsay Siebelt, Professor Nicola Innes, Dr Stephen MacGillivray, Dr Anna Gavine, Dr Haggi Michael Haggi; University of York: Dr Kerry Bell, Dr Cath Jackson, Professor Karl Atkin, Belen Corbacho; and Helen Jones from Leeds Gypsy and Traveller Exchange.

Professor Alison McFadden was the lead investigator.

The full report from this work is available here: https://discovery.dundee.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/29156227/McFadden_et_al_GRT_Trust_and_Engagement_Final_report_140918.pdf

This research was funded by the Department of Health Policy Research Programme: PR-R8-0314-24002