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National mental health policies in the UK have a common theme of seeking to develop working partnerships between people who use mental health services, their families and carers and professionals. In Somerset, following a staff training programme, a Family Liaison Service has been developed whereby systemically trained staff work alongside inpatient staff to hold family meetings as part of the assessment and admission process on all wards for working age adults and older people. This article aims to focus on this initiative.

The article considers the development of the Family Liaison Service and evaluates its progress based on audit data, feedback from families using the service, and a survey of staff experience. Issues raised in developing family inclusive services are discussed.

Evaluation of the service suggests that, although there is still progress to be made, considerable success has been achieved in embedding the service on inpatient units with a substantial increase in meetings held between staff and families. Feedback from families is positive and staff report increased confidence in engaging with families and carers.

This article describes a transferable model for the implementation of national policy to develop working partnerships with families and carers in mainstream mental health services.

It is ten years since Valuing People promised a ‘new deal’ for family carers and included specific objectives for involving families in local partnership boards, providing better support for them in their caring role and investing in family leadership nationally, regionally and locally. Over the last decade there have been many advances towards meeting these objectives. However, we cannot afford to be complacent, and must continue investing in families and people with learning disabilities to ensure that the gains of the past decade are not lost.

Current national policies present a challenge to the existing mental health workforce as most staff have not been trained to work with people within the context of their social support network. This paper presents two complementary training initiatives designed to enable mental health staff to meet the range of needs of families: (1) an in‐house accredited (one‐year) course that has enabled the successful creation of specialist family intervention in psychosis teams; and (2) a whole‐team trust‐wide training programme (three‐day course) to promote partnership working with families by both community and inpatient teams. Issues that have enabled the successful translation of training to practice are considered.

This article reviews current policies and their impact on carers' lives, and highlights the potential limitations of a more personalised approach to care. Using some key research findings and illustrative case studies, the article argues that we should build on the achievements of the personalisation reforms, but not limit our ambition to offering individuals more choice and control over their services. Instead, there should be a focus on individuals achieving ordinary life chances and families achieving emotional and financial sustainability. For people to experience a truly integrated response to their needs, professionals must be able to achieve integration not only across service boundaries, but also across their responses to inter‐linked individuals. Recognising this lessens the risk of offering care solutions that result in trade‐offs between one family member's independence and another's.

For elderly people the decision to enter an institution is usually the result of complex interactions which involves not only themselves but also professionals and family members. This research concerns the role of families in the decision‐making process over the admission of their elderly relatives to nursing homes in Taiwan. The families' views, including their influence and involvement in the process, were examined. It was found that most elderly people in Taiwan were cared for in their own homes by family members, but under certain circumstances, nursing home entry seemed inevitable. The decision‐making process, mainly within a family context, was influenced by the needs of the elderly people, by their adult children, including their availability, and by perceptions about nursing home entry. The pattern of family care and involvement may change and reasons are suggested for this.

This article aims to explore the new challenge posed by the first generations of people with learning disabilities who are now living into older age in significant numbers. Most are living with family carers, who are themselves ageing. This represents a major transition in people's lives and one to which services must respond if a normal life event is not to be turned into a crisis. Though this issue has been acknowledged by government, much more needs to be done to provide people with learning disabilities and their families with the necessary support to enjoy a healthy and active old age.

This article draws on the work of the authors for over a decade in this field.

Learning disabled people are likely to experience the age discrimination common in much older people provision and practice and the caring relationship is undermined in the short and long term. Evidence on the extension of personalisation indicates that it presents very considerable challenges for this group of families.

More information is needed on this growing population. More preventative support is needed to sustain the caring relationship while the family is living together, to support families to plan for the future, and to provide support when the caring relationship breaks down.

The article draws together data from the fields of ageing, learning disability and family care to highlight the increasing challenge, which this growing, but neglected, population presents both for policy and practice. It examines the implications for both the older people themselves and for the ageing family carers with whom the majority live and of current government policy in social care and welfare benefits for this very vulnerable group.

France, once a pioneer in psychiatry, is now sinking as its population faces major mental health challenges. This includes the 12 Million French individuals with psychiatric conditions, the lack of appropriate structures and the shortage of skilled mental health professionals, but it also leaves families in critical situations. The purpose of this study is to explore the carers’ caregiving experiences and to suggest ways to organise educational programmes to support mental health carers in France.

The research was conducted from January 2018 to November 2019. It included French carers of patients with mental conditions. Recorded semi-structured interviews were used and findings were analysed through an inductive thematic analysis and regrouped into key themes.

Participants had overwhelming negative representations of “mental illness”. The fact that they were excluded from participating in the patient’s health management further added to their misconceptions around mental disability, it limited their communication with their family and amplified their burdens.

There is an urgent need for carer empowerment; carers should be included in educational programmes, they should benefit from French Government subsidies and social-network assistance and receive quality assistance by trained mental health professionals. The critical situation of carers can only be addressed by combining these three steps and through the action of appropriate actors in the field of mental health, thus alleviating the current paradigm of psychiatric care in France.

Thousands of research papers regarding carers have been published in other countries. In addition yet, to the knowledge, only a few investigations on French mental health carers have been conducted to this day. The singularity of this research lies in the rare individual interviews, which provided us with first-hand testimonies of mental health carers in France. This data could be of vital aid for professionals and for policymakers when advocating for better support of carers in mental health.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief overview of the literature to date which has focused on co-production within mental healthcare in the UK, including service user and carer involvement and collaboration.

The paper presents key outcomes from studies which have explicitly attempted to introduce co-produced care in addition to specific tools designed to encourage co-production within mental health services. The paper debates the cultural and ideological shift required for staff, service users and family members to undertake co-produced care and outlines challenges ahead with respect to service redesign and new roles in practice.

Informal carers (family and friends) are recognised as a fundamental resource for mental health service provision, as well as a rich source of expertise through experience, yet their views are rarely solicited by mental health professionals or taken into account during decision making. This issue is considered alongside new policy recommendations which advocate the development of co-produced services and care.

Despite the launch of a number of initiatives designed to build on peer experience and support, there has been a lack of attention on the differing dynamic which remains evident between healthcare professionals and people using mental health services. Co-production sheds a light on the blurring of roles, trust and shared endeavour (Slay and Stephens, 2013) but, despite an increase in peer recovery workers across England, there has been little research or service development designed to focus explicitly on this particular dynamic.

Despite these challenges, coproduction in mental healthcare represents a real opportunity for the skills and experience of family members to be taken into account and could provide a mechanism to achieve the “triangle of care” with input, recognition and respect given to all (service users, carers, professionals) whose lives are touched by mental distress. However, lack of attention in relation to carer perspectives, expertise and potential involvement could undermine the potential for coproduction to act as a vehicle to encourage person-centred care which accounts for social in addition to clinical factors.

The families of people with severe and enduring mental illness assume a major responsibility for the provision of care and support to their relatives over extended time periods (Rose et al., 2004). Involving carers in discussions about care planning could help to provide a wider picture about the impact of mental health difficulties, beyond symptom reduction. The “co-production of care” reflects a desire to work meaningfully and fully with service users and carers. However, to date, little work has been undertaken in order to coproduce services through the “triangle of care” with carers bringing their own skills, resources and expertise.

This paper debates the current involvement of carers across mental healthcare and debates whether co-production could be a vehicle to utilise carer expertise, enhance quality and satisfaction with mental healthcare. The critique of current work highlights the danger of increasing expectations on service providers to undertake work aligned to key initiatives (shared decision-making, person-centred care, co-production), that have common underpinning principles but, in the absence of practical guidance, could be addressed in isolation rather than as an integrated approach within a “triangle of care”.

This article describes a project that explored the views, experiences and aspirations of young people with Down's Syndrome and their family carers. Each young person had gone or was going through the transition to adulthood. Following a scoping study, young people who were leading the lives of their choice, for example through use of person‐centred planning or direct payments, were interviewed, and their stories were published in a booklet. The next phase brought other young people and their families together in workshops to support them in planning for their future, based on the information from the booklet. Interviews with the young people and their families dispelled the myth that parents are obstacles to progress and change. All families actively supported their son or daughter to achieve their aspirations and had high expectations for them.

Neurological disease and neurodisability cause significant disruption to families, who come under substantial pressure to adapt to changes in the condition over time. Family members are often disadvantaged in their coping because of infrequent access to professional consultations, and by default carers tend to neglect their own needs. One threat to relationships can be a pull towards acting as the main carer, even carrying out personal care tasks, especially if the family unit resists extending its boundaries to include paid carers. We discuss the distinct challenges that families are faced with at different stages of disease progression (emerging, diagnostic, longterm adaptation, crisis, chronic, and terminal) for one particular condition (multiple sclerosis or MS). A number of recommendations are made for supporting family members in the form of a ‘family care pathway’ for neurology and neurodisability.