UK Research and Innovation has established the Population Health Improvement UK (PHI-UK), investing £35 million into four themed consortia over four years. Its mission is to bring together expertise and insight from across research, public health, and diverse communities, harnessing large-scale data and addressing upstream determinants of health, to improve public health and reduce inequalities.

Through shared leadership, King’s College London and Thrive LDN will drive the Population Mental Health Consortium (PMHC), which aims to create new opportunities for population-based improvements in mental health across all four devolved nations in the UK.

The PMHC will focus on four cross-cutting areas and three challenge areas. The cross-cutting areas include: (1) Partners in policy, implementation, and lived experience, (2) Data, linkages, and causal inference, (3) Narrowing inequalities, and (4) Training and capacity building. The three challenge areas include Children and young people’s mental health, Suicide and self-harm prevention, and Multiple long-term conditions.

The PMHC has received over £8m of funding from UKRI. The list of partners in the consortium can be found at the bottom of this page.

This is an exciting initiative to tackle a growing need to address population mental health challenges facing the UK today. We see the PMHC as a fantastic opportunity whereby over the next four years, researchers will galvanise strong partnerships with people with lived experience, public health professionals, local government and voluntary organisations, artists, and other interdisciplinary stakeholders to identify and evaluate population-level interventions.

The PMHC has strong links to national bodies which provides an exciting opportunity for ensuring integrated cross-national and regional policy impact of the research.