Recent Projects and activities
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Over the last decade, the MHSR group has been involved in over thirty projects, securing more than €5 million in funding and producing hundreds of communication outputs (see the publications tab for details).
Here, we highlight a selection of recent and notable research projects and provide access to their full reports.
1. Patient Autonomy and Social Support
The REVE-DROOM project aims to assess the impact of Drug Consumption Rooms (DCRs) in Belgium through a longitudinal comparative study. While existing research highlights the public health benefits of DCRs—such as reduced morbidity, mortality, and improved access to care—most studies rely on observational data from a few non-European cities, raising concerns about evidence quality. REVE-DROOM addresses this gap by studying Belgium’s two DCRs—in Liège and Brussels —in comparison to control sites in Antwerp and Ghent. The study will track DCR users over 18 months, examining their risky consumption behaviors, health outcomes, and pathways to recovery, including social integration and quality of life. This natural experiment will generate robust evidence on the effectiveness of DCRs within a European context.
2. Mental Health Inequalities
The REMEDI project explored whether general practitioners (GPs) may inadvertently contribute to mental health inequalities affecting individuals with a migration background. Combining a quasi-experimental video vignette survey, discourse analysis, interviews, and a literature review, it examined and explained discrimination in primary care, leading to validated recommendations to enhance equitable mental health care access for migrants.
Full report REMEDI
3. Service Coordination and Care Integration
The SUMHIT research project focused on the current level of collaboration and integration between the general mental health care sector and the specialized addiction care sector. The project explored how integration could be effectively improved by evaluating various aspects of the issue at the levels of service users, professionals, services, service networks, and the broader health care system, using both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Watch the story of the project
4. Interventions and Policy Evaluations
The Egonet project focuses on improving care coordination for patients with long-term mental, physical, and social issues by emphasizing the importance of understanding their social support networks. Building on the previous "Morpheus" project, Egonet aims to develop a routine intervention and tool to collect, describe, visualize, and analyze patients' social support networks, enhancing care coordination and assessing its impact.
Egonet: présentation générale
Matériau pour l'utilisation d'Egonet
ADHAIRE aims to evaluate the effectiveness of an advocacy coalition approach in enhancing the implementation of tobacco-free school policies (TFSP) to prevent adolescent smoking. It explores practical methods to strengthen tobacco control measures in educational settings, ultimately promoting a smoke-free environment for adolescents.
5. Policy Analysis and Stakehoder Engagement
RESPOND (Improving the Preparedness of Health Systems to Reduce Mental Health and Psychosocial Concerns resulting from the COVID-19 Pandemic) is a European research project carried out in 8 European countries. It Studies the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent containment policies on the mental health of the general and specific vulnerable populations, including frontline health workers. The MHSR group was co-responsible of a Work Package about how mental health is set on the agenda of covid-19 policies of European countries, in close collaboration with the London School of Economics. The group also conducts an implementation study of a self-help and problem management intervention for frontline workers in long-term care facilities in Belgium, and contributes to an international comparison of studies on the impact of covid-19 on the mental health of the general population.