Thank you for taking the time to take part in our survey. It is really very much appreciated during this very busy period. The survey is intended for people who work in mental health care in the UK in any sector or any speciality. 

Our aim is to better understand how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting mental health services and the people who may use them. To make our work practically useful, we are especially interested in  what is being done to manage these impacts, both in the NHS and the voluntary sector, and in what is working well and what less well. This study is being carried out by the NIHR Mental Health Policy Research Unit (MHPRU) for England, whose core team is based at at University College London (UCL) and King's College London. We are a team of independent university-based researchers, whose remit  is to make relevant evidence available to policy makers. Our partners include the Centre for Mental Health and the Mental Elf. We will be feeding back results from the study as quickly as possible to policy makers including the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England, to study participants and to the wider mental health community, with initial results available within a fortnight.

The survey should take around 15 to 20 minutes to complete (depending how much you write in the open-ended questions) and the responses you provide are fully confidential. If you don’t have time to finish it, please complete as much as you can (responses are stored as you go). Questions can be skipped if necessary. To help us better understand the impact of COVID-19 on mental health care over time, we ask if you are willing to give your email address, so that we can contact you later for some further data collection. You can complete the survey without leaving your email address if you wish. We ask which region you are based in but not which organisation you work for.

As well as sharing our overall findings with policy makers and study participants, we plan to disseminate it as widely as possible to those likely to be able to make use of the information. We will therefore share our findings on the internet and via social media, as well as publishing in scientific journals. However, the data will be kept fully confidential, and no publications will include any information that could allow you to be identified. We are also developing a page of helpful resources, and will add to this as information comes in via this survey and other sources.

The survey has been developed using UCL Opinio and is hosted on UCL Information Services Division infrastructure. The responses you provide are therefore not processed by any third parties. This study has been approved by the King's College London research ethics committee (MRA-19/20-18372). If you have any queries, please contact Prof Alan Simpson, co-director of the PRU at King’s College London (alan.simpson@kcl.ac.uk) or Prof Sonia Johnson (s.johnson@ucl.ac.uk), Director of the PRU at UCL.

Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for all your hard work in continuing to provide mental health care during these very challenging times.

By clicking on the ‘Start’ button below, you confirm you have read and understood all of the above text.