Some of the places where GRiST is being used

Currently, the electronic version of GRiST (eGRiST) is being used across a range of clinical services in: Humber NHS Foundation Trust (1600 staff); Cumbria Partnership Trust (1500 staff); Birmingham Children s Hospital; Raphael Healthcare, Newark, for their 40-bedded female forensic unit; and the Craegmoor Hospital group. The Mental Health Matters charity has delivered GRiST training for its clinicians and is rolling it out across the range of services they provide in Yorkshire. Another charity, MCCH, is about to do the same for GRiST in social-care services. Other private organisations and individuals are using the paper version on an informal basis (i.e. without any specific agreement). North Carolina in America used GRiST for an evaluation study and GRiST has even been translated into Estonian for a pilot project. We know from experience that the paper version of GRiST is being used without us being told and we expect more interest in eGRiST as it becomes increasingly embedded in services.

GRiST is being delivered to mental-health organisations as a cloud-computing service from Aston University with a database of assessments increasing every day. At present there are approximately 20,000 anonymous patient risk profiles on the system with about 1400 new assessments being completed each month. This volume will increase as more Trusts begin to use eGRiST. These empirical data will permit on-going analysis of risk-assessment decisions that no other tool can achieve because they do not have a formal specification of risk data at the right level of detail and they do not automatically record clinical risk judgements alongside the data. The database was one of the reasons Aston was a partner in joint funding by the US NIH and UK ESRC to investigate health inequalities in mental health.