Mental health communication between service users and professionals: disseminating practice‐congruent research Available to Purchase

This paper considers the demand for evidence‐based practice in mental health communication and describes how evidence from studies of health communication, as well as recommendations from educational models, professional bodies and policy directives have been incorporated into our ‘Brief, Ordinary and Effective’ model for communication in nursing. A key challenge in putting evidence to work in health care and bridging the theory‐practice gap concerns the social and organisational context that may not always work to sustain new initiatives. Accordingly, we will describe an attempt to support and consolidate awareness of the role of evidence in health care communication via a Managed Innovation Network and the development of the Brief, Ordinary and Effective model of health care communication. This enables us to align the quest for new knowledge and insights that are practice‐congruent with the kinds of applicability criteria that modern health care providers set out. This has yielded important insights about how research can be embedded in informed practice and how evidence‐based communicative practice can be nurtured and made viable in communication in mental health care.