Impact
Below is the impact Bazaar has had at our home, the Bloom Building, for the year 2024/25.
Want to find out more about the impact Bazaar has in other environments? Fill out our enquiry form below for more info!
Measuring Impact
We use two main scales to measure our impact in Bazaar: the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) and the General Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), to measure the symptoms of depression and anxiety respectively.
On average, our members at the Bloom Building this year (24/25) saw a 38% reduction in depression symptoms and a 44% reduction in anxiety symptoms.
Of our members who completed the programme, 77% showed improvements on the PHQ-9 and 81% improved on the GAD-7 – we can confidently say that despite everyone’s experience with poor mental health being different, the vast majority of people who complete Bazaar feel better by the end.
Looking across our members this year, we see that the average scores start in the ‘moderate’ threshold and end in the ‘mild’ threshold for both anxiety and depression.
Overall, 39% of people who start Bazaar finish the full eight weeks – slightly higher than the 37% of people who access NHS Talking Therapies (Nuffield Trust, 2024).
Using 2023/24 data from NHS Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care Board, we can see that for people who do not meet the clinical thresholds for anxiety and depression (i.e. the people we intend to support with Bazaar), Open Door outperforms the NHS in symptom reduction.
Everyone who completed Bazaar would recommend it to others, and members consistently praised the impact of having a mentor with them to complete the programme. One member said: “Anyone can Google how to deal with mental health, actually having someone to talk to and go through it with you helps… you see the good in you instead of all the bad”.
Case Study - Sarah's Story
Sarah came to Bazaar last year looking for support with anxiety. Her home life was difficult, with ill parents and had recently been diagnosed with ADHD.
Sarah is an animal lover, enjoys playing on her Playstation and spending time playing the piano, drawing and getting out in nature, but she was really concerned about how much she worried about different things. Paired with a volunteer peer mentor, Sarah then started her Bazaar journey.
For the next eight weeks, she was exposed to new tools and techniques to help her with her anxiety. She said that she enjoyed learning to ask why she was feeling worried and challenging her negative thoughts. She also said that she was learning new tools to distract herself, avoid bad habits and help her sleep.
By the end of the programme, she said her mentor was ‘really helpful, kind and knowledgeable’, and that it was ‘great to see the things I have had to deal with written down and ways to manage them’. In the end, Sarah’s GAD-7 score had gone from 15 down to two, suggesting minimal anxiety.
You can access Bazaar in Birkenhead here, or enquire below to find out how your institution, organisation, or business can partner up with Open Door to bring Bazaar to your community.