Increasing child and adolescent mental health content in undergraduate occupational therapy, social work and nursing programs: Lessons learnt

Abstract

This paper investigates the perceived usefulness of a CD-Rom based child and adolescent mental health teaching resource distributed to educators from undergraduate nursing, occupational therapy and social work programs, and identifies the barriers to incorporating specialist mental health content into comprehensive degree level courses. Specially selected educators from throughout New Zealand responded to a questionnaire about the resource. Results from their feedback indicate that the resource was generally well received and that it was perceived to be useful for teaching at an undergraduate level. However, three main issues appear to be hindering the up-take of the resource in the relevant undergraduate programs: the resource content did not readily integrate into the various existing courses; several practical and additional barriers impeded the up-take and use of the resource; and incorporating a self-directed multi-media based teaching resource into a range of existing degree level programs that used a face-to-face group-based teaching model was perceived to be problematic. Recommendations are offered to assist in overcoming these difficulties in order to increase the extent of child and adolescent mental health teaching delivered at an undergraduate level.