Depression and anxiety are the most prevalent mental health difficulties in the workplace in the EU, causing immense suffering and costing the global economy €1 trillion each year in lost productivity. Certain sectors, in particular construction, health and ICT, have an elevated risk of mental health difficulties, with those working in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) being particularly vulnerable. However, most SMEs have limited capacity to address mental health promotion and provide mental health interventions to staff. As SMEs comprise more than 90% of all EU businesses, there is a huge potential to influence population health. MENTUPP aims to improve mental health and wellbeing in the workplace by developing, implementing and evaluating a comprehensive, multilevel intervention targeting both clinical (depressive, anxiety disorders) and non-clinical (stress, burnout, wellbeing, depressive symptoms) mental health issues, as well as combating the stigma of mental (ill-) health. The intervention will be tailored for SMEs in construction, healthcare and ICT and assessed in a multi-country Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial. The primary aim is to improve mental health in the workplace, with a secondary aim to reduce depression and suicidal behaviour. MENTUPP will be conducted by an interdisciplinary consortium that includes world leading experts in mental health in occupational settings, depression, anxiety, stress, suicide prevention and stigma. It builds on a solid foundation of evidence, in particular leveraging partner European Alliance Against Depression’s four-level intervention to improve mental health and reduce suicide risk and partner Mates in Construction’s successful workplace intervention to reduce suicide in construction workers. Long-lasting impact is also a key priority of the project, with activities dedicated to the development of replication materials to support long-term use of the MENTUPP intervention in SMEs across Europe.

Recent years have seen rapid changes in the workplace arising from the digital and green transitions (‘twin transition’), as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. New forms of work and work management have arisen, which can affect the physical and mental health of workers in new ways (both positive and negative) that are not yet well understood. Yet, workplaces can be health-promoting environments. Robust, comprehensive data must be generated, made available to key stakeholders, translated into evidence-based guidance to support the design of policies and used to develop evidence-based interventions and guidelines to promote mental and physical well-being and health in the workplace. PROSPERH will gather timely data and robust evidence on factors influencing mental and physical health in the workplace from the literature and analysis of existing high-quality datasets. Based on this evidence and building on existing EU-funded and national interventions, the project will develop and validate the multi-level PROSPERH intervention, delivered via the PROSPERH Portal. The intervention will target both organisational (work), peer and individual (worker) aspects, with three components focusing on health promotion, online self-monitoring & self-management and clinical care or coaching referral pathways. Development will focus on tailoring content for three sectors experiencing significant change (telework and ICT-based mobile work, health and construction), with validation carried out in 10 representative European countries and Australia through a cluster-randomised controlled trial to determine effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. To ensure that the expected impacts of PROSPERH are achieved during and beyond the project lifetime, key outputs of the project will include open access publications and FAIR datasets, guidelines and recommendations and a roadmap for making the PROSPERH Portal freely available in a sustainable manner.

Europe is facing a number of global challenges such as digitalisation, migration, and climate change which increase demands on citizens’ resilience and puts them at risk of developing mental health problems. RECONNECTED responds to this problem by developing and testing a digital support system to promote resilience and connect vulnerable citizens in socially disadvantaged communities and evaluate whether this results in citizens’ improved mental health, increased mental health awareness, reduced stigma, and improved social participation, at affordable costs for implementation. Taking a complex systems approach, the project will first extend and test a recently developed theoretical integrative framework of urban mental health to include mental health responses to global transitions. This will provide a good understanding of how risk and protective factors at the individual, social, environmental, and societal levels interact dynamically and impact on mental health. The framework will provide actionable insights for policy decision making and will be used to develop a support system with intervention tools targeting individual and social levels simultaneously. The platform will be co-created with stakeholders in the local community in nine European countries. These interventions will be non-stigmatising and empowering and tailored to the needs of the local community. RECONNECTED will test the feasibility and effectiveness of the support system in these communities and, in the final stage, develop implementation scenarios that balance effectiveness with efficiency and scalability to inform policy decision making that can be used throughout Europe. The methodological approach in the project is theory-informed and data-driven, and we will use co-creation throughout the project to ensure that actionable insights and intervention tools are relevant, acceptable, and ethical to end-users and other stakeholders.