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A year‐long review of services was carried out in South Essex by local authority and primary care trust commissioners to help inform future commissioning plans. The review included a focus group to consult service users, carers, project staff and referrers across the area. This was undertaken by SE‐SURG, a group of current and former service users who carry out research and consultation work for mental health service commissioners and providers. The results of the consultation are presented here, particularly in relation to the strengths and limitations of current services, service user aspirations and staff expectations.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how an older people’s mental health service involves service users in research and service improvement projects, the value of this work and the ways in which barriers to user-led research have been approached and handled.

The authors conducted a reflective review of their experiences of running “ResearchNet”, a group aimed at putting service users’ perspectives at the heart of service improvement projects, which benefits from and develops its members’ related skills. The authors explore overcoming barriers to service user involvement in research.

This paper identified the following key elements that enabled ResearchNet to overcome barriers which might be found in service user–led research: recruitment processes; identifying research projects; building confidence, sustaining motivation and overcoming setbacks; developing service user’s research skills; keeping multiple views in mind; involving people with dementia; being responsive to group members’ needs; and keeping the group safe.

Oxleas National Health Service is currently looking at integrating with the quality improvement team to provide further structure and training to group members.

This paper explores an under-represented area of research – service user inclusion in older adult mental health research and service improvement. It provides much needed clinical implications for clinicians seeking to increase clients’ involvement in research and service development projects.

Narrative Therapy offers thinking and practices which can support the development of narratives of desistance and recovery. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the two ways in which collective narrative practice has been used in a Low Secure Forensic Recovery Service: The Tree of Life and the Knowledge Group, including the evaluation of the Knowledge Group.

The therapeutic approach taken was collective narrative practice. The evaluation design for the Knowledge Group was service user led, resulting in a qualitative approach: a focus group that was thematically analysed.

Collective narrative practice offered service users the opportunity to enhance their narratives of strength and desistance, and to contribute socially by sharing this with others. This encouraged the development of identities beyond the “patient” and “offender” identities. It gave service users the opportunity to take a position of expertise and power where they were listened to and respected.

There is a wide range of possibility for the creative use of these strategies in forensic settings. They are a useful addition to the forensic practitioner’s toolkit.

There is a wide range of possibility for the creative use of these strategies in forensic settings. They are a useful addition to the forensic practitioner’s toolkit.

Collective narrative practice positions service users as taking social action, for example sharing their experiences with other services users, in educational contexts and for wider social understanding.

The therapeutic interventions described offer a promising approach which has not yet been fully exploited for use in forensic mental health services, including a novel approach to collective narrative practice.

Three separate focus groups were conducted to compare the views of service users, carers and specialist health professionals on community services for adults with psychosis and learning disabilities. Participants were asked which staff, treatments or interventions and methods of working or style of service organisation make a significant contribution to helping people with psychosis and learning disabilities. Although there were few direct contradictions or conflicts between the three groups, the priorities of service users, carers and professionals often differed. Development of community services for adults with psychosis and learning disabilities should incorporate the views of service users and their carers as well as clinicians.

The purpose of this paper is to explore mental health service users’ experiences of involvement in a clinical psychology course.

Five participants were recruited from a service user and carer group aligned to a university professional clinical psychology course. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and data were analysed using an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).

Four superordinate themes, group processes, advocating, transforming and power, were drawn from the data, with ten subthemes emerging capturing experiences on the personal, professional and group levels.

The study is not generalisable and has a small number of participants. However, many of the themes have resonance with existing literature.

Service user initiatives need to consider the personal and contextual issues that service users may have experienced prior to their involvement. The needs of service user initiatives may change over time. Such initiatives must evolve in conjunction with the personal and political journeys of participants.

Few studies have explored the experiences of mental health service users in clinical psychology training using a robust methodology. The current study suggests that eliciting these experiences highlights factors that facilitate involvement as well as the barriers.

This paper discusses the practicalities and limitations of establishing a service user consultation group to guide service developments, based on the evaluation of a podiatry patient panel in South Yorkshire. It describes the specific difficulties in recruiting a representative panel of service users, and the gradual acculturation of the panel from a group of challenging activists to unpaid members of the podiatry department.

The purpose of this paper is to undertake a preliminary evaluation of a novel intervention – Recovery Inspiration Group, which uses recovery stories to promote hope and inspiration for recovery among people with complex mental health difficulties.

The Recovery Inspiration Group was delivered to women on a specialist personality disorder inpatient unit, who were concurrently participating in a dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) Programme. In total, 12 service users participated in the RIG and as part of the intervention, wrote down key reflections after hearing each recovery story. A thematic analysis of these reflections formed the primary basis of the evaluation. Descriptive statistics derived from a service user feedback survey (n=6) supplemented the qualitative findings.

Three themes were identified in the qualitative data, suggesting that participants had engaged with recovery-oriented reflections and experiences: recovery stories as validating and inspiring; Generalisation of DBT skills; shifting perspectives of recovery: doing better rather than being better. The survey results unanimously endorsed the RIG as a worthwhile and validating experience, which participants would recommend to other service users.

Recovery Inspiration Group appears to be a low-cost and easily replicable intervention with the potential to promote hope and inspiration for recovery among people with complex mental health difficulties.

Recovery Inspiration Group is a novel approach to harnessing the wisdom of people with lived experience of mental health difficulties, to foster hope among users of mental health inpatient services.

LibQUAL+® allows users to rate their minimum, perceived, and desired levels of service for 22 items in three dimensions: information control, library as place, and service affect. Using the results from the 2005 survey at the University of Texas at Austin, this paper aims to examine how well the service priorities of library staff are aligned with the priorities of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty.

The paper has re‐scaled the “desired” score for each item to reflect the degree to which the item is above or below the average desired level for that individual. The rescaled scores (termed “priority” scores) for the 22 items were then compared between the four groups using a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA).

Preliminary results indicate that service priorities for library staff align more closely with those of undergraduates than with those of graduate students and faculty.

This analysis is a first step in identifying service priority gaps between library staff and the users they serve. The intention is to promote discussion among library staff about users' needs and how closely staff service priorities align with those needs. In addition, the findings may prove useful as management information by allowing the analysis of users' service priorities and integrating the results of this analysis into organizational decision making and planning processes.

This paper describes a development of LibQUAL+® that enables a greater depth of understanding of service priorities.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, assess the effects of the peers’ recovery narratives on service users’ perceived mental health recovery; and second, explore various stakeholders’ perspectives on the program, specifically its facilitators and barriers.

The study used a convergent mixed-method design. First, a pre-test post-test design was used with service users to evaluate the peer recovery narrative program. They completed the Recovery Assessment Scale (RAS) and participated in qualitative interviews that explored perspectives on their mental health recovery before and after the program. Second, a cross-sectional design was used to explore stakeholder groups’ perspectives on the recovery narrative program immediately after listening to the narratives.

While findings show that there was no statistical difference between scores on the RAS before and after the peer narratives, thematic analysis revealed a change in service users’ understanding of recovery post-narratives. Other stakeholder groups confirmed this change. However, some healthcare professionals questioned the universal positive effects of the peer recovery narrative program on service users. Stakeholders agreed that beyond effects of the peer recovery narrative program on service users, there were also positive effects among the peers themselves.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first Canadian study, and one of the first studies to rely on mixed-methods and various stakeholder groups to evaluate the impact of peer recovery narratives on service users. The research, thus, fills a knowledge gap on peer recovery narratives.

In Britain, the last two decades have seen a considerable increase in focus on service users' involvement in the provision of services that directly affect them, particularly where service users originate from a hard to reach population such as drug users. While the National Treatment Agency and drug and alcohol action teams often extol the virtues of the involvement of drug users in their service provision, participation of this type does not come without problems of its own. Experience of drug user involvement in service provision is much more established in Europe and this article seeks to utilise European examples in illustrating the potential pitfalls of such a strategy. Case studies are examined from three countries: the Netherlands, where drug policy is relatively liberal and drug user groups have been established since the 1970s; Denmark, where drug policy is fairly well balanced between repression and tolerance and drug user groups have been established since the 1990s; and Sweden, where drug policy is relatively repressive and drug user groups are only just emerging. Salient points from these case studies are then used to form the discussion, relating European experiences to the situation in Britain.