• PsyGrid is an e-science project that has the potential to address many of the problems that arise within the healthcare system today. It will use the valuable pool of knowledge from computer scientists to facilitate the improvement of mental health care. PsyGrid will provide resources to clinicians, researchers and others interested in first episode psychosis through the use of ‘Health Informatics’.

• The PsyGrid project will aid the advance of mental health in the treatment of psychotic disorders whose evidence base is underdeveloped.The urgent need for large trials of complex interventions in mental health has been explicitly flagged. For example, the extent to which an urban environment contributes to the risk of psychosis has only recently been understood and quantified.

• The focus of first episode psychosis (FEP) in PsyGrid arises out of a convergence of key questions in clinical science that require large, well characterised, representative cohorts to address them, along with recent developments in the NHS and NHS R&D to facilitate such research. Delayed detection and treatment is a widespread problem and predicts poor clinical outcome. Eighty early intervention teams for psychosis in people aged 14-35 had been established across England by the end of 2004. These teams will form a focus for case ascertainment and data collection in PsyGrid. By treating every new patient as a participant in a longitudinal study, PsyGrid will start to test a new model of care and research combined.

We believe that this combination is essential to providing a timely and more flexible evidence base for future healthcare.

• The PsyGrid project team is an alliance between researchers and clinicians from medicine and computer science, collaborating to open up new areas of research. PsyGrid will provide a virtual research environment for research psychiatrists collaborating on investigations into first episode psychosis and early intervention treatments.

• It will also provide the capability to collect and store longitudinal psychological assessment data from patients with FEP in a secure repository. It will provide the capability to look for correlations with other data sets relevant to psychosis and medical imaging data. It will also potentially support other clinical trials of early intervention treatments for psychosis.

• As PsyGrid is an MHRN adopted project, the baseline and demographic clinical data collection for the initial phase of the project, named ‘Outlook’ is currently running in each of the MHRN ‘hubs’ throughout the UK. Recruitment has begun and our ‘Clinical Research Officers’ have been performing the required number assessments with the first few patients in. The assessments have had positive responses from the clients currently in the study, with the present recruits completing the questionnaires within the predicted number of interviews, with ease – PLEASE SEE ‘ABOUT OUTLOOK’ FOR FULL DETAILS ON THIS PROJECT.