RE-SHIFT is a EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie project, with a three-year program of research and training, conducted by me, Dr. Davide Papola, MD, PhD.

The project is be hosted at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Mental Health and Service Evaluation Department of Neuroscience, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, Section of Psychiatry, University of Verona (UNIVR, Italy) and at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of Harvad Medical School (Harvard University, Boston, MA, US). Research and training will be supervised by Prof. Corrado Barbui (main supervisor) and by Prof. Vikram Patel (supervisor for the outgoing phase), both renowned scholars in the Global Mental Health field.

RE-SHIFT focuses on preventing and treating common mental disorders in people living in low-resource settings. It aims at (a) dismantling psychosocial interventions delivered by non specialist providers into their components, (b) evaluating each component efficacy and redialing the most effective components into a novel task shifting psychosocial intervention, and (c) implementing findings through a worldwide coverage elearning platform.

RE-SHIFT will also develop a publicly available calculator to estimate the efficacy of each component based on individual participant characteristics.

Starting from an analysis of individual participant data from all randomized controlled trials conducted in the field of global mental health available on the matter, RE-SHIFT will pioneer a sophisticated study design to unravel which components work best and for whom, identifying at the same time how participant, provider and delivery characteristics moderate the outcome and how beneficial effects of the psychosocial task shifting interventions are mediated. With this information it will be possible to tailor interventions according to the specific needs of diverse populations, allowing the “RE-SHIFTing” of available resources to the best of their use.