New research highlights benefits of Peer Open Dialogue

An innovative approach to mental health support used in Dorset has been shown to reduce the need for psychiatric hospital admissions in a major new national study.

Research published in The Lancet Psychiatry found that people who received Open Dialogue support were significantly less likely to be admitted to psychiatric inpatient care, with the odds of avoiding admission more than three times higher. Participants in the national study, named the ODDESSI Trial, were also half as likely to be referred to crisis services and reported greater satisfaction with their care.

Open Dialogue puts individuals at the heart of their care by building a network of support around them, facilitated through network meetings that bring people together to share perspectives and agree how to move forward.

Phil received support through Open Dialogue at the Access Wellbeing hub in Weymouth. He explains: “Open Dialogue was a really big shift for myself and my wife. I realised my family wanted to know more about what I was going through. I had previously chosen not to have those conversations with them to protect them, but that was actually doing a lot of damage. We now use many of the tools we were given through Open Dialogue in our daily lives.”

Open Dialogue is widely used across Dorset through the Peer Open Dialogue Dorset (PODD) initiative, part of the Access Wellbeing transformation programme for community mental health services. A total of 122 staff have now been trained in Open Dialogue in Dorset, working across both the NHS and voluntary sector, and around 450 network meetings have taken place in the past 12 months.

It is this integrated approach – spanning the NHS and voluntary sector – that makes Dorset particularly distinctive, bringing colleagues from different sectors together to train and work together.

Daniel Hallett, Peer Open Dialogue lead at Dorset HealthCare, explains: “The findings from the recent ODDESSI study are incredibly encouraging, and reinforce the approach we have been developing here in Dorset.”

“At its heart, Open Dialogue is about giving people a stronger voice in their own care and strengthening the network around them. In Dorset, we have now trained over 120 colleagues across NHS and voluntary sector services, and believe we are the first area to use Open Dialogue in this way, creating a shared way of working across traditional organisational and professional boundaries.”

Open Dialogue was first developed in Finland and has since attracted growing international interest. The new study – the ODDESSI Trial – involved 494 adults presenting to NHS mental health services in crisis and was carried out across five NHS mental health trusts in England as a randomised trial. Although Dorset was not one of the trusts taking part in the trial, PODD is already being used extensively across the county.

Find out more about Peer Open Dialogue Dorset at www.dorsetaccesswellbeing.co.uk/PODD

Read the full findings of the ODDESSI Trial in The Lancet: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(26)00229-4/fulltext