Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of service user involvement in mental health training but little is known about what staff, trainees and service users themselves want to achieve.

Three separate focus groups were held with service users, training staff and trainees associated with a clinical psychology training programme. Thematic analysis was used to identify aims for involvement.

All groups wanted to ensure that future professionals “remained human” in the way they relate to people who use services. Service user and carer involvement was seen as a way of achieving this and mitigating the problem of “them and us thinking”. The authors found that groups had some aims in common and others that were unique. Service users highlighted the aim of achieving equality with mental health professionals as an outcome of their involvement in teaching.

The samples were small and from one programme.

Common aims can be highlighted to foster collaborative working. However, the findings suggest that service users and carers, staff and trainees may also have different priorities for learning. These need to be recognised and addressed by mental health educators.

This was the first study to explore in depth the differing aims of different stakeholder groups for service user involvement. Clarification of aims is a vital first step in developing any future measure of the impact of service user involvement on mental health practice.

Stigma towards people with mental health problems is a significant problem and appears trenchant despite recent anti-stigma campaigns. Attitudes develop in young children, and may be stronger and less malleable in adolescence. Early intervention may be important for mental health education and stigma prevention. Theory, evidence and practical considerations all suggest that teachers’ involvement is key. By exploring communication about mental health between teachers and young children, it will be possible to elaborate how stigma develops and may be ameliorated. The purpose of this paper is to explore teachers’ accounts of this communication and the factors that influence it.

Semi-structured interviews with 15 primary school teachers were transcribed and analysed using a grounded theory approach.

Discussions about mental health were largely absent from the classroom, due to teachers’ anxiety. Teachers felt the need to protect children from exposure to people with mental health problems and even from information about the topic, believed they lacked the necessary expertise, worried that such discussions were outside their remit and were anxious about parents’ reactions.

This was the first study to interview teachers on this topic and suggests that a significant opportunity to address fear and stigma is being missed. Teachers’ silence may reinforce that mental health problems are taboo, and prevent children from developing knowledge and a language to talk about mental health. The inclusion of teachers in early mental health education and could promote better understanding and more inclusive attitudes, especially if supported by educational policy and curriculum.

This paper considers the impact of reimbursement on delayed transfers and whole‐systems planning. The paper argues that making hospital discharge work with the focus only on the interface between health and social care will have limited and short‐term results. More radical cultural change is needed to tackle the problems of an ageing society. The paper draws on recent thinking which challenges the way in which services are currently provided to older people, and calls for new ways for services to be commissioned and provided. The paper advocates changes towards community‐based processes and pathways, across a wide range of services and within a much broader whole‐systems framework, to support independence.

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of layer thickness on irreversible thermal expansion, residual stress and mechanical properties of additively manufactured parts.

Samples were printed at several layer thicknesses, and their irreversible thermal expansion, tensile strength and flexural strength were determined.

Irreversible thermal strain increases with decreasing layer thickness, up to 22 per cent strain. Tensile and flexural strengths exhibited a peak at a layer thickness of 200 μm although the maximum was not statistically significant at a 95 per cent confidence interval. Tensile strength was 54 to 97 per cent of reported values for injection molded acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) and 29 to 73 per cent of those reported for bulk ABS. Flexural strength was 18 to 41 per cent of reported flexural strength for bulk ABS.

The large irreversible thermal strain exhibited that corresponding residual stresses could lead to failure of additively manufactured parts over time. Additionally, the observed irreversible thermal strains could enable thermally responsive shape in additively manufactured parts. Variation in mechanical properties with layer thickness will also affect manufactured parts.

Tailorable irreversible thermal strain of this magnitude has not been previously reported for additively manufactured parts. This strain occurs in parts made with both high-end and consumer grade fused deposition modeling machines. Additionally, the impact of layer thickness on tensile and flexural properties of additively manufactured parts has received limited attention in the literature.

Service user and carer involvement in all aspects of the health and care research process, from co-applicant on funding applications to active engagement in a research study, is now a requirement for most research funders. However, as co-production increases and service users and carers take on more responsibilities, this involvement has legal, governance and ethical implications. The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness of the issues and consider potential solutions.

Experiences of engagement as co-applicants in research funding applications, of involvement as research study team members, and as co-researchers were gathered from a range of service user and carer experts. Consultation and a workshop gathered further evidence from a range of stakeholders across the research management community.

Service users and carers, who contribute to the research protocol and process, feel a strong sense of responsibility to ensure the high quality of a research study. However, they may be new to their roles, status and key responsibilities when acting as project team members, co-researchers or co-applicants engaging in funding applications. The responsibility of sponsors, grant holding organisations, funders and other members of the research community is to communicate with and support service users and carers in those roles. More needs to be done to understand the contractual, a legal and governance issues and responsibilities that are specific to service user and carer co-applicants, project team members and co-researchers, from both an organisational and individual service user and carer perspective.

The implications of the findings are to raise awareness of the practical, legal and ethical issues arising from this type of involvement and the potential risks arising from lack of cohesion or understanding. The review also highlights the concerns and barriers service users and carers may find in becoming involved.

The findings highlight a range of issues for research regulators, sponsors and investigators to consider to ensure service users and carers can fulfil their responsibilities and be supported in doing so.

Teams focus on a common and valued goal, and effective teams are able to alter their behaviors in pursuit of this goal. When teams are viewed in the context of a dynamic environment, they must adapt to challenges in the environment in order to maintain team effectiveness. In this light, we describe various sources of team variation and how they combine with individual-level, team-level, and dynamical mechanisms for maintaining team effectiveness in a dynamic environment. The combination of these elements produces a systems view of team effectiveness. Our goals are to begin to define, both in words and in operational terms, team effectiveness from this perspective and to evaluate this definition in the context of team training using intelligent tutoring systems (team ITS). In addressing these goals, we present an example of real-time analysis of team effectiveness and some challenges for team ITS training based on a dynamical systems view of team effectiveness.