Award-winning Derbyshire Consultancy Firm Secures NHS Mental Health Contract

By Mental Health Correspondent

Founders of an award-winning Derbyshire consultancy have shared key findings on how to encourage more men and over-50s to get help for their mental health after working with the NHS on the issue.

Matt Clutterham and Jenny Jarvis, founders of brand and human transformation company Q Branch Consulting, are booked up for months in advance, working with businesses on creating an authentic brand and voice to stand out in the fast-moving commercial world. 

This time they were specially chosen on a different type of project: working with a large NHS trust to try and boost numbers of men and over-50s getting support for anxiety and depression through ‘Talking Therapies’.

Now the couple have shared key findings as to why certain social groups might not access services that could dramatically improve their mental health – and what providers could do about it.

Jenny said:

“We were really happy to be chosen to work with the NHS and use our brand and human transformation expertise on something that is so important – both to us and to wider society.

“We had a deep dive into the issue, looking at why some sectors of society, specifically men and over-50s, are finding it much harder to access the Talking Therapies service offered through the NHS.

“We’re really happy to say that as a result of our work the NHS trust is already seeing many more people in those harder-to-reach groups reach out for help, which is a great result and absolutely pivotal if we are going to be seeing any kind of improvement in the mental health crisis we find ourselves in.”

The latest statistics show that nearly two million people in the UK have sought help through the NHS’s Talking Therapies programme.

But with around one in six people in the country reporting symptoms of depression, there are still millions of people in the country who may not be reaching out for help that could benefit them.

Q Branch Consulting conducted intensive focus groups examining why over-50s were not accessing help through Talking Therapies.

They identified that in order to access help, it was very important for older patients to see recognisable and trusted figures in any visual marketing materials such as posters, including recognising their own gender and a trusted professional voice. 

Jenny said:

“Our focus groups found that the older generation would not necessarily trust a poster suggesting they could access Talking Therapies if it came just from the ‘NHS’. They would be far more likely to pay attention if it was from a trusted professional person, such as a GP or pharmacist.

“We also found that the older generation will often not articulate they feel depressed, only going so far as to say things like ‘feeling a bit off’. They don’t want to be seen as a burden and they want to feel valued and needed. 

“So we created a messaging campaign that reached out to older people by acknowledging their many years of caring for others, suggesting it may be their turn to be helped themselves.

“We also used everyday language to help forge connections with an audience, rather than medical speak that can quickly become alienating. Our research showed that the older age group absolutely must not feel pitied, but empowered to act on themselves and not have their independence threatened.”

To create better marketing for men and their mental health, Q Branch Consulting turned to their work with the male suicide prevention charity Tough to Talk – through which they won the Outstanding Collaboration category of The Business Desk’s Business Masters East Midlands Awards in 2024, after impressing judges with the scale of their impact with the charity.

Matt, who is a trustee of the charity, said:

“It’s well recognised that despite increased awareness, men find it much harder to seek help for their health generally than women. Tough to Talk is doing brilliant work reaching out to men in the workplace and delivering its ‘tough talks’ – trying to prevent men from taking the awful step of taking their own life.

“It was actually through our work with Tough to Talk that we were contacted by the NHS and we were happy to be able to use some of our knowledge in this area. One obvious example was to create messaging that featured men – something that surprisingly isn’t always the case when it comes to this kind of marketing campaign. If you want to reach a particular audience, you have to really understand them and creating visuals in which people can recognise themselves is very important. 

“We’re really thrilled to have been asked to provide this work for the NHS and we’d love to work with more trusts in using our expertise honed through business to help cut through the noise and land messages in hearts and minds where they will have the most impact.”

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