Aims for service user involvement in mental health training: staying human

Abstract

Purpose 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. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings 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. Research limitations/implications The samples were small and from one programme. Practical implications 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. Originality/value 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.

Keeping us grounded: academic staff perceptions of service user and carer involvement in health and social work training

“…The humanising effects of SUAC involvement on academics found in this study also resonate with those of Lea et al (2016) and underline the grounding effect of such work as being very important in reminding them of the core value base of their respective professions and the need to be constantly aware of issues of professional power. Findings such as these represent new positive knowledge regarding the SUAC contribution at HE and might be seen as part of a positive trajectory over the past two decades of activity and research in this area.…”

“…This study did not find that academics perceived SUACs to be primarily involved for their own personal development (Webber and Robinson, 2012), although the benefits to SUACs from HE involvement were seen as significant, as recognised by Rooney, Unwin and Osborne (2016). More significantly, staff perceived that SUAC involvement added value and knowledge to student experiences, while simultaneously enriching the working lives of academics, particularly in respect of challenges presented to value bases and to traditional models of power and knowledge hierarchies (Lea et al, 2016). Furthermore, staff cited how working alongside SUACs had acted as a form of CPD, particularly when workload pressures (Graham, 2015) preclude staff taking up more formal CPD opportunities.…”

“…This study is also notable in that it reported higher student satisfaction scores in module evaluations, attributable to SUAC involvement. Finally, Lea et al (2016) carried out a small-scale qualitative study on the views of SUACs, students and clinical psychology lecturers regarding the impact of SUAC involvement in curriculum design and delivery, and found that the lecturers reported positive outcomes in terms of encouraging them to value lived experience more. Such findings as these above can be seen to resonate with much of the earlier, positive literature.…”

Expectations and experiences of psychological therapy from the client perspective: a qualitative study

“…The valuable contribution that 'experts by experience' can make to applied psychology and psychotherapy training programmes has attracted increasing attention over recent years (e.g. Lea et al, 2016), and researchers could usefully think about ways to involve expert clients in Client experiences and expectations of therapy 21 research and evaluation activities (for example, client-led interviews) to help elicit balanced accounts of the client perspective of psychological therapy.…”

Mentoring trainee psychologists: learning from lived experience

“…In the wider literature, service-users and carers have voiced similar motivations for involvement work (Lea et al, 2016;Anghel & Ramon, 2009;Turner et al, 2000) whilst students have reported that service-user involvement in teaching has given them a greater insight into service-users' perspectives, greater empathy (Repper & Breeze, 2007;Rush, 2008) and ideas about how to improve mental health services (Happell et al, 2014).…”