220 Chapter 7 clinical, social workers or others requires the right incentives and the recognition of distributional effects measurement as a critical part of initiatives in routine outcome monitoring, process evaluations and other performance assessment frameworks. Policymakers are vital enablers to expand the amount of evidence on policy effectiveness generated through quasi-experimental designs. Efforts needed include accepting the accountability of the evaluation’s uncertain results and acknowledging the minimum timing, data and policy implementation requirements needed to achieve robust research. In the ideal world, policymakers would engage with researchers at early stages of policy planning and design, so that researchers could advise decisions that maximise the possibility of causal evaluations, either prospectively or retrospectively. While aiming to uncover cause-effects, researchers should also be flexible to accommodate unexpected changes in the plans, implementation pitfalls, and several other issues that may lead to a downgrade of the robustness of agreed research designs. Collaboration research-to-policy and knowledge translation initiatives require action at several levels. Key facilitators at the institutional level include the existence of strategical leadership, organisational networks and institutional alliances, and strategic communication on the topic. At the individual level, facilitators include collaborative relationships or personal contact between researchers and policy-makers. Collaborations and knowledge translation efforts must be formally required and adequately incentivised and rewarded by institutions and research funders so that these practices become ubiquitous in Academic environments and part of (junior) researchers’ training and curricula. Understanding what works and how Before diving into recommendations towards topics to be targeted by mental health inequalities research and policy it is essential to acknowledge that this thesis could not cover many important domains. Chapters 2 to 5 cover exposures related to the treatment and support of individuals with mental health conditions. Other areas that should receive further attention but cannot be advised by my PhD include the social determinants of mental health, including the heightening of risk factors and erosion of protective factors across the life course, and the active promotion of good mental health and prevention of mental ill-health. Promotion and prevention efforts should go beyond the narrow biomedical framing of mental disorders currently adopted by the health and social care systems – and therefore also followed in this thesis – and embrace the mental health staging continuum model [33]. They should also be based on a wholegovernment approach, anchored in interventions that go beyond health care systems and are implemented through labour, education, and welfare, among other [31, 34]. Back to the scope of this thesis – health and social care for people with mental health conditions – important lessons can be extracted from the policy levers schematised in Figure 1. The first point relates to the fact that mental health care availability, eligibility
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