Search results

The purpose of this paper is to describe service user involvement, explain some of the key issues that define, affect or protect mental health in later life and show how involvement may contribute to better mental health in later life.

The paper reviews existing definitions of involvement and mental health in later life; provides a more detailed review of some examples of involvement at a range of levels and illustrates how these could have a positive impact on mental health.

Active involvement and engagement at all levels offers significant opportunities for older people to protect and improve their own mental health and the mental health of society as a whole.

This research does not set out to promote any particular intervention or involvement technique. The examples given have been evaluated in a variety of ways.

Service user involvement should be considered as an important potential contributor to mental health in later life.

The paper encourages people in later life to be considered as a community resource rather than a problem that needs to be solved.

This paper brings together existing research with a focus on the relationship between involvement and individual and collective mental health.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the role of gender, food health involvement, and food health information competency in predicting consumer food health information seeking.

A conceptual model for predicting consumer food health information seeking is proposed. The predicting constructs are general food health involvement, general food health competency, product‐specific health involvement, and product‐specific food health competency. The relationships between construct are estimated using structural equation modelling. Data were collected in a nationally representative consumer‐panel among 504 Danish consumers using a questionnaire.

The results suggest that improving consumers' general food health involvement may only lead to increased product‐specific health information seeking if consumers at the same time are involved in the specific product category. The results also revealed that women are generally more food health involved than men but did not support previous research suggesting that women also are more knowledgeable about healthy food and that they more often seek product‐specific food health‐related information.

This research concentrated on analysing one food product, salad dressing. A large cross‐section of products ought to be studied to improve the generalizability of the obtained result and thus future research may wish to incorporate a wider range of food products.

The results suggest that food authorities and/or food marketers seeking to promote a healthy life‐style should consider providing examples of healthy product categories (food authorities) and/or particular products (food marketers) along with their general health information.

This paper empirically investigates gender along with a number of mental constructs for the purpose of understanding consumers' food health information seeking. Also, the paper explores age and educational level as possible moderating variables of the consumer food health information seeking process.

This paper reports a small pilot study exploring ways that staff providing mental health services experience change. Group discussions focused on the drive toward service user involvement in mental health services. Discussions were held with two teams of professionals and indicate that mental health professionals experience a tension in balancing service user involvement with other dimensions of their roles and identities. Key issues include:• staff as potential, or past, service users themselves• service user involvement as a challenge to professional identities• change as being inherently difficult within ‘stuck’ systems• change as having an emotional, as well as instrumental, effect.Implications for practitioners in engaging with the involvement agenda are discussed, and highlight key issues for workforce training.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of consumers' health beliefs, health involvement, and risk perception on fish consumption behaviour in five European countries.

Cross‐sectional data were collected through a pan‐European consumer survey (n=4,786) with samples representative for age and region in Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Spain and Poland. First, the cross‐cultural validity and cross‐cultural differences in health beliefs, health involvement and risk perception in relation to fish have been tested. Next, structural equation modelling (LISREL) was used in order to simultaneously estimate the strength and direction of relationships between health beliefs, health involvement and risk perception in relation to fish consumption.

Health involvement links up indirectly with subjective health and with total fish consumption, in both cases through increased interest in healthy eating. Interest in healthy eating positively and directly influences fish consumption. Increased risk perception from fish consumption negatively influences consumers' subjective health, as well as consumers' total fish consumption. Finally, subjective health positively relates to satisfaction with life.

This study focused on fish as a product category, and included only a limited number of attitudinal constructs.

This paper provides a unique model relating health beliefs, health involvement and risk perception to fish consumption, which has been tested and validated using a large pan‐European consumer sample.

The notion of mental health service user involvement in curriculum design and delivery has become commonplace over recent years. However, concern has been expressed that the rhetoric has not matched the reality. In particular, service user involvement has tended towards either tokenism or over‐sensitivity to the point of near inertia. By contrast, this paper describes a project that took a pragmatic approach and was designed to make involvement in curriculum planning, design and delivery meaningful and worthwhile for service users, students and educators alike. The paper has two principal objectives. In the first instance, it outlines the strategy for involvement that was used to inform curriculum design and delivery at the University of Abertay Dundee. This was grounded in the academic literature. Second, it provides an evaluation of this strategy based on practical experience and identifies some of the difficulties that must be overcome to work in a collaborative manner. In so doing, it examines some of the common concerns of educational staff, service users and students in relation to service user involvement. In conclusion, we provide recommendations for educators seeking to involve mental health service users in a meaningful manner in both the design of training programmes for mental health workers, and in their delivery.

As moderators of the health campaign process, involvement is divided into enduring and situational involvement. Based on the review of interdisciplinary literatures, a new health campaign model and optimal strategies are proposed. The new model has two dimensions (enduring and situational involvement) and four strategies: an affect‐evoking, an information‐oriented, a cue‐emphasizing, and a balanced‐argument strategy. For the empirical research, a 262 experiment with 143 undergraduate students using four different advertisements was conducted. Generally, the moderating effects of both enduring and situational involvement were supported. Regardless of some deviations from the proposed model, optimal strategies fit into the designated involvement level. Public relations practitioners will be able to choose the optimal message strategy after identifying the characteristic of targeted publics for health‐related campaigns.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate different types of patient involvement in Denmark, and to discuss the potential implications of pursuing several strategies for patient involvement simultaneously.

The paper presents a preliminary framework for analysis of patient involvement in health care. This framework is used to analyze key governance features of patient involvement in Denmark based on previous research papers and reports describing patient involvement in Danish health care.

Patient involvement is important in Denmark at the rhetorical level, and many policies and initiatives have been introduced. All three governance forms (voice, choice and co-production) are used. However, there are important barriers and limitations in translating the rhetoric into practice, and potential synergy and negative synergy effects can be identified when pursuing the strategies at the same time.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed framework further.

The paper includes implications for the development of patient involvement in health care.

This paper fulfills a need to study different types of patient involvement and to develop a theoretical framework for characterizing and analyzing such involvement strategies.

User involvement in research is entering the mainstream of traditional mental health research. In practice, there are diverse ways in which the process of involvement is experienced by mental health service user researchers. This paper aims to explore two diverse experiences of involvement by the researcher.

Auto-ethnography is the research methodology used in this study; it combines a process of reflective writing and critical analysis which enables the author to explore experiences of being both a service user and academic researcher. Two accounts of the author’s involvement in mental health research are presented: one which builds on a consultation model and the other based on co-production principles.

Experiences of power-sharing and collaborative decision-making, alongside disempowerment, are discussed, leading to exploration of the theoretical and practical processes for promoting participation of users in research.

The research is limited because it is undertaken by one individual in a local setting, and is therefore is not generalisable; however, it provides useful insights into the diverse processes of involvement that many service users experience.

Recommendations are presented to support the involvement of service users in research, with final remarks offered considering the possible future implementation of this still emerging tradition.

This paper reflects on the experiences of one service user academic involved in research and highlights diverse experiences of both empowering and disempowering involvement, providing recommendations for best practice.

The training of future mental health professionals offers one avenue of change to improve service user and carer involvement in mental health services. This study looked at experiences of trainees on the University of Surrey's Clinical Psychology Doctorate programme in involving service users and carers on training placements. Twenty trainees completed a self‐report semistructured questionnaire providing qualitative data that were analysed using thematic analysis. A number of benefits of service user and carer involvement in training were identified as well as practical considerations, including factors that might facilitate or limit such involvement on training placements. It is intended that the findings will prove useful to others involved with the training of mental health professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how mental health service user involvement in health professional education adds value to student learning about recovery-oriented practice and to determine the quality and suitability of instruments used in studies to evaluate this involvement in terms of their: relationship to recovery-oriented practice; and psychometric properties.

Studies of service user involvement were reviewed to identify their research objectives. These were mapped against an Australian recovery-oriented practice capability framework together with the constructs measured by instruments used in these studies. Psychometric properties for each instrument were evaluated using the COSMIN checklist.

While research objectives are not stated in terms of recovery-oriented practice, they do relate to some elements of a recovery-oriented practice framework. No instrument measures outcomes against all recovery-oriented practice domains. The AQ has the strongest evidence for its psychometric properties. The most commonly used instrument measures only stigma and has poorly validated psychometric properties.

This paper demonstrates that the “value add” of service user involvement in health professional education has been poorly defined and measured to date. Learning from lived experience is central to a recovery-orientation and is an expectation of health professional education programmes. Defining objectives for service user involvement in terms of recovery-oriented practice and developing an instrument which measures student learning against these objectives are important areas for ongoing research supporting improved approaches to supporting people’s recovery.