Aims and objectives: To explore how nurses influence the perceptions and experience of safety among consumers who have been admitted to an acute mental health unit. Background: Safety is a priority in acute mental health inpatient units, yet consumers do not always experience acute units as safe. Despite being primary stakeholders, little is known about what safety means for consumers in acute mental health units. Design: A qualitative descriptive study informed by naturalistic enquiry was conducted and is reported using the COREQ checklist. Methods: Fifteen consumers with experience of mental illness participated in semistructured individual interviews. These interviews explored what safety meant for them during their acute mental health unit admissions. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. Findings: The theme Influence of Nurses reflected that the way nurses engaged in acute mental health units had a profound impact on participants' sense of safety. Three sub-themes emerged as follows: (a) Availability: "It's about nurses spending time with you"; (b) Being responsive: "They would listen if you had a concern"; and (c) Caring: "Little acts of kindness." Conclusions: These findings challenge the dominant discourse around safety in mental health organisations, in which nursing practice is often oriented towards the management of risk, rather than the promotion of safety. The findings demonstrate that, through their clinical practice, nurses can enhance consumers' feelings of safety in the acute mental health unit. Relevance to clinical practice: Nurses play a key role in providing care within acute mental health units. It is vital that the behaviours and actions nurses can enact in order to promote feelings of safety among consumers in this setting are enabled at individual, unit and organisational levels.

Being admitted to an acute mental health unit can lead to feelings of shame, and loss of personhood for some consumers. Promoting safety for consumers is a function of acute mental health units. This paper explores how consumers’ personhood influences their perception and experience of safety in acute mental health units. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with 15 participants who had previously been admitted to an acute mental health unit. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. Participants perceived safety as being intrinsically linked to their personhood. When participants’ innate worth was affirmed in their interactions with staff, participants felt safe. Three subthemes were identified: ‘Seen as an equal’, ‘Being respected’, and ‘Able to make choices’. These findings can be used to inform nursing practices that enhance consumers’ sense of personhood and, in so doing, promote consumers’ safety and recovery in acute mental health units.

Aims and objectives To explore how the physical and social environment of acute mental health units influences consumers' perception and experience of safety. Background Acute mental health units are places in which consumers should feel safe. Not all consumers, however, feel safe in this environment. Little is known about what contributes to consumers' feelings of safety in this setting. Design The study used a qualitative descriptive design, influenced by naturalistic enquiry. Data were analysed using thematic analysis and are reported according to the COREQ checklist. Methods Fifteen people who had experienced admission to an acute mental health unit were individually interviewed. Results Having a supportive environment enhanced consumers' perception and experience of safety. A supportive environment was experienced when consumers had privacy, felt safe from other consumers and had meaningful activities to participate in within the acute mental health unit. In contrast, having their privacy breached by other consumers made participants feel unsafe. Many participants were fearful of other consumers, and felt unsafe and unable to protect themselves. Lack of meaningful activities led to boredom and contributed to consumers feeling unsafe. Conclusions Personal spaces should address consumers' privacy needs without compromising staff access. Staff presence enhances consumers' feelings of safety, but this need can be heightened when consumers are unable to alert staff when they feel unsafe. Meaningful activities link consumers to their lives outside of the hospital and can enhance recovery. Relevance to clinical practice Understanding how the acute unit environment is perceived by consumers can assist nurses and managers to promote feelings of safety among consumers. Feeling safe can, in turn, optimise recovery.

BackgroundChoosing how to answer a research question requires an understanding of philosophical and theoretical assumptions and how these inform a study's methodology and methods. For the novice researcher, this can be an overwhelming undertaking.Ensuring there is a clear alignment between philosophy, theory, methodology and methods is an essential part of the research process, and enables research to be undertaken with clarity and integrity. This alignment must be a good fit for the research aim, and for the researcher.Aim This paper describes the alignment between qualitative description and naturalistic inquiry and how it was applied to an exploration of the meaning of safety for consumers with experience of admission to an acute mental health unit.Discussion Understanding the alignment between qualitative descriptive methodology and naturalistic inquiry provided a clear pathway for a novice researcher. ConclusionThe assumptions that underpin a methodological approach need to be unpacked in order to understand how a complex research question can be effectively answered.Implications for practice Qualitative description, informed by naturalistic inquiry offers novice researchers a practical way to explore and answer complex research problems.

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For more than four decades, people with lived experience of mental health concerns have been redefining the concept of recovery. No longer just synonymous with cure, recovery is understood in contemporary terms as a personal journey; a process. This process is known as personal recovery. A desire to work in alignment with the principles of personal recovery, while exploring the ways in which the phenomenon of safety is understood by people who have experienced acute mental health inpatient admission, led the authors to apply the research approach known as phenomenography. The aim of this paper is to propose the ways in which phenomenography and the principles of personal recovery align. The philosophy, characteristics and processes of phenomenography and of personal recovery are compared.