Eating disorders are serious mental health conditions that affect around one million Australians. While evidence-based treatments are available, long wait-times for formal care can delay appropriate treatment. Community services often aim to address this gap by offering co-designed, peer-led supports, however they often lack research infrastructure to appropriately evaluate their programs and services.

Integrating research and evaluation within community-based services holds significant implications for service delivery, funding and translation to inform future practice and eating disorder care for people and their families. This research project will involve collaborating with service providers at Eating Disorders Victoria, a not-for-profit eating disorders organisation, through meetings, focus groups and interviews to develop, integrate and evaluate research to support evaluation of an existing support peer-led program (the “Carer Coaching Program”). There will be three main stages: planning, implementation and evaluation. We will ask the following questions:

·        How can research and evaluation be designed and embedded to enhance the development, delivery and evaluation of programs offered by a community-based service in eating disorders?

·        What are the perceptions, barriers and enablers of service providers of embedding research into their work?

·        What are the impacts and outcomes (i.e., experiences, feasibility, effectiveness) of embedding research and evaluation to support service delivery of a consumer-led intervention within a community-based eating disorders service?

We aim to:

1.      Describe the collaborative process of working with service providers through iterative co-design to identify needs, develop research processes and monitor the progress of evaluation

2.      Integrate the developed research evaluation for an existing consumer-led program and report on the outcomes of doing so to inform sustainable, effective and efficient research practices within the community setting and translation across services

3.      Using data gained through the co-designed research evaluation, evaluate the clinical effectiveness of the consumer-led program on consumer-participant outcomes.

This project will employ a community based participatory research, mixed methods design.

Partners/Organisations: Eating Disorders Victoria (EDV)​

Currently under review with University of Sydney’s Human Research and Ethics Committee.