NCMD Seminar Presents 'The Care Pathway Enhancement (CaPE) Clinic: Optimizing research delivery—a local pilot to a national initiative'

Today at our NCMD Seminar Programme, we had the pleasure of having speakers Dr Mourad Wahba and Susanna Carella who delivered a great presentation on 'The Care Pathway Enhancement (CaPE) Clinic: Optimizing research delivery—a local pilot to a national initiative' and 'The Role of Reward Processing in the Pathophysiology and Treatment of Bipolar Disorders'.

Dr Wahba, a Consultant Psychiatrist and Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at Newcastle University, opened the seminar by introducing us to the CaPE Clinic; a research clinic focused on the treatment of mood disorders. He provided us with an overview of the clinic, which aims to bridge the gap between primary and secondary mental health care. He also described the methods of patient recruitment, self-referral and GP referral, and described barriers to recruitment.

Dr Wahba then delved deeper into the ASCEnD trial that is being held though the clinic. The trial looks at treating bipolar disorder with either a combination of aripiprazole and sertraline, or, quetiatpine. It is a Newcastle led, multi-centred clinical trial. If you are interested in finding out more about the ASCEnd trial, please see the link below.

Susanna Carella, 2nd year PhD student at Newcastle University, then introduced us to her research pertaining the ASCEnD study. Her interest is in cognition in mood disorders and her PhD focuses on the role of reward processing in the pathophysiology and treatment of bipolar disorders, with a particular focus on value-based attention and computational tools.

Thank you very much to our speakers this week.