Biography

Ahead of the Game: The journey from research to scale-up

Ahead of the Game (AOTG) is a multi-component mental health literacy and resilience program aimed at adolescent males and delivered through community sports clubs. The program involves face-to-face mental health literacy workshops for adolescents, their parents, and their coaches. It also includes a face-to-face resilience workshops for adolescents that is supplemented with 6 online modules of 10-15 minutes in duration each. The AOTG program has demonstrated effectiveness through a large controlled trial, which showed that the program leads to increased knowledge about depression and anxiety, greater intentions to seek help from formal sources such as psychologists, increased confidence to seek mental health information, and improved resilience. On the back of these results, Movember and it’s research partners engaged in international translation and scale up efforts over a three-year period. As a result, AOTG has been scaled across the UK, Canada, and Australia – including as the official program of the Rugby League World Cup 2021. In this presentation, I will give an overview of the process of developing and scaling AOTG In addition, I will share some of the most important ‘lessons learned’ over the last seven years. I aim to share these lessons to illuminate the journey of taking a promising idea through to international impact.