Miss Alyssa Morse
Areas of expertise
- Mental Health 111714
Research interests
- Lived experience involvement in research, health services and health policy
- Empathy, social support, social strain and their impacts on health and wellbeing
- Mental health service and intervention design and evaluation
Biography
Alyssa is a Postdoctoral Fellow at ACACIA: The ACT Consumer and Carer Mental Health Research Unit. In this role, she works on a variety of research projects that are relevant to and for the benefit of mental health consumers and carers in the ACT. Currently, Alyssa is leading the Understanding Participation project, which aims to understand the current nature of consumer and carer participation in policy and services in the ACT with a particular focus on how the consumer and carer voice is valued, and what the concept of value means to different stakeholder groups in the health sector.
Alyssa also works in youth mental health research. Most recently, she was the Trial Manager of the Silence is Deadly evaluation, a controlled trial of a mental health intervention for adolescent men run by Menslink in ACT secondary schools.
Researcher's projects
Understanding Participation: Measuring the value and impact of consumer and carer voices in services and policy
The Understanding Participation project is being conducted in partnership with a working group of representatives from Health Care Consumers’ Association (HCCA), The ACT Mental Health Consumer Network (ACTMHCN), Carers ACT, the ACT Health Directorate, and independent consumer and carer representatives from the ACACIA Advisory Group. Using grounded theory methods, the project aims to understand the nature of consumer and carer participation in health services and policy in the ACT, including recent changes in the participatory environment and the responses to those changes. It will determine what existing mechanisms are used in the ACT to demonstrate how consumer and carer participation is impacting on policy and services. Finally, the project will explore the concept of ‘value’, investigating how consumer and carer voices are valued and the meaning of ‘value’ in the participatory environment from multiple stakeholder perspectives. These concepts will be explored in a series of interviews with lived experience representatives, policy makers and service providers and a multi-stakeholder roundtable. The ultimate goal of the project is to create a set of consumer- and carer-developed principles for participation, value and impact, and an accompanying set of indicators to be used by the health sector for measurement.
This project is funded by an RSPH Excellence in Population Health Research Award.
Whose story is it?
This project explored mental health consumer and carer perspectives on procedural research ethics and shared story-telling in research settings. The project had a particular focus on mental health research involving carers and stories of their lived experience. A discussion forum and in-depth interviews with consumers, carers and lived-experience researchers from the ACT were conducted and analysed to explore these issues. The next stage of the project will use the findings from this data to develop practice recommendations for researchers and Human Research Ethics Committees.
Past student projects
Honours Students
Sarah Passmore: The experiences of and perceived barriers to primary health care accessibility for Australian LGBTQ+ people.
Publications
- Gulliver, A, Banfield, M, Morse, A et al 2019, 'A Peer-Led Electronic Mental Health Recovery App in a Community-Based Public Mental Health Service: Pilot Trial', JMIR Formative Research, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 1-9.
- Gulliver, A, Pike, G, Banfield, M et al 2019, 'Evaluation of the Music Engagement Program for people with Alzheimer's disease and dementia: Study protocol for a pilot trial', Contemporary Clinical Trials Communications, vol. 15, no. 100419, pp. 1-7.
- Morse, A, Forbes, O, Jones, B et al 2019, 'Whose story is it? Mental health consumer and carer views on carer participation in research [IN PRESS]', Health Expectations, vol. Online, pp. 1-7.
- Banfield, M, Morse, A, Gulliver, A et al 2018, 'Mental health research priorities in Australia: a consumer and carer agenda', Health Research Policy and Systems, vol. 16, no. 119, pp. 11pp.
- Gulliver, A, Morse, A, Wilson, N et al 2018, 'An evaluation of a tailored care program for complex and persistent mental health problems: Partners in Recovery program', Evaluation and Program Planning, vol. 68, pp. 99-107pp.
- Banfield, M, Randall, R, O'Brien, M et al 2018, 'Lived experience researchers partnering with consumers and carers to improve mental health research: Reflections from an Australian initiative', International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 1219-1229pp.
- Gulliver, A, Banfield, M, Reynolds, J et al 2017, 'A Peer-Led Electronic Mental Health Recovery App in an Adult Mental Health Service: Study Protocol for a Pilot Trial', JMIR Research Protocols, vol. 6, no. 12, pp. e248.
- Calear, A, Banfield, M, Batterham, P et al 2017, 'Silence is deadly: a cluster-randomised controlled trial of a mental health help-seeking intervention for young men', BMC Public Health, vol. 17, no. 834, pp. 1-8.
