Hey, I’m Carl, a registered nurse and graduate student in public health, and I spent a few months with CREST.BD this summer as a trainee. One of the projects that I helped out with was a paper that explored combining Delphi consensus consultation and community-based participatory research methods in a past CREST.BD study that searched for effective self-management strategies for bipolar disorder.

But first – what exactly are self-management strategies? Although medications are often a bedrock of treatment for people with bipolar disorder, people with lived experience of the condition, healthcare providers, and academics alike are recognizing that psychological and social factors are also usually essentially for good health and quality of life. One of CREST.BD’s peer researchers (people who lived with bipolar disorder who are also co-researchers) came up with an excellent definition of self-management – the plans and routines that a person uses to promote health and quality of life. These strategies can include a wide array of activities, such as those that help monitor mood and symptoms, promote education and exercise, ensure adequate sleep and diet, that encourage relaxation and hope, and so on. The list appears to be endless, but which strategies should we use, and how can we be sure that these strategies are actually helpful? And given that there is a particular gap in our knowledge of effective self-management strategies for halting progression into hypomania/mania, where should we look? This is where the Delphi consensus consultation comes into play.

Delphi consensus consultation relies on panels of experts; for instance, people with lived experience of bipolar disorder and healthcare providers to complete surveys, where they rate and rank, for example, self-management strategies they see as most helpful. These experts then see the results from the survey, and complete it once more. Doing this, the experts are aware of what others think, and are able to keep or change their responses as they see fit. By the end, a level of consensus; that is, agreement surfaces.

Finding self-management strategies to include in the surveys, designing the surveys themselves, finding experts to complete the surveys, and sharing the results with the community requires much work. When people with bipolar disorder are directly included and involved in research tasks, work then better reflects the needs and priorities of the broader community. Community-based participatory research is just that. It creates opportunities for people with lived experience to engage and produce knowledge as equal partners with researchers. Much has been theorized about community-based participatory research, and in our paper, we drew on well-established principles to explain how our project on self-management strategies merged Delphi consensus consultation and community-based participatory research into real life action.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Delphi consensus consultation and community-based participatory research methods, and about bipolar disorder self-management, I think you’ll enjoy our new paper (currently under review with a journal). Stay tuned!

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters