Creating a psychologically informed group: ‘Listening and joining in and offering little stories’

Abstract

This article outlines the creation and delivery of a six-session psychologically informed group, ‘The Talking Group’, on an older adult inpatient mental health ward. We summarise the content of the sessions and explore the feedback received from people who attended the group. Thematic analysis identified themes from 175 responses which were collected from 93 participants between September 2018 – June 2020. Our findings demonstrated that although the overall feedback was positive and attendees continued to attend the group, there were also areas the group could be improved. We have summarised the improvement suggestions into ‘recommendation’ tables throughout the article, which we hope will provide some guidance for clinicians planning to develop groups in a similar context.