Abstract
Health policy guidelines state that people who use mental health services should be involved in the development of the services they receive (Department of Health, 1999). Examples of good practice in this respect are reported from staff recruitment (Diamond et al, 2003), research (Trivedi & Wykes, 2002) and training (Repper, 2000; Harper, 2003). However, support for user involvement is not universal (Summers, 2003; Soffe, 2004) and, most significantly, there is considerable confusion about what is meant by involvement. The following case study will address these issues by: (a) adding to the evidence regarding the successful involvement of service users in training; and (b) clarifying the process by which involvement can be safely achieved.
Highlights
The session on service user perspectives was scheduled for 1.5 h and the manual offered the choice of either working in small groups on pre-prepared narratives written by service users or involving service users directly
A focus upon recovery was important in engendering hope, as each service user spoke of building lives that were of a better quality, albeit with the occasional setback, than before the onset of their psychotic experiences
The involvement of service users in the workshop emphasised the significance of the impact that user views can have on mental health workers
Summary
Health policy guidelines state that people who use mental health services should be involved in the development of the services they receive (Department of Health, 1999). Description of the training ‘Psychosis Revisited’ is a 2-day workshop (Basset et al, 2003). A draft trainers’ manual was written in April 2002 and mental health workers within West Sussex Health and Social Care NHS Trust were invited to facilitate pilot workshops. The first of two pilot workshops was facilitated by a clinical psychologist (M.H.) and an occupational therapist (A.B.), and delivered to a community mental health/assertive outreach team consisting of approximately 20 workers, the majority of whom had received professional training (community psychiatric nurses, approved social workers, clinical psychologists and a consultant psychiatrist). The particular session that will form the focus of this case study was entitled Service User Perspectives (for a full description of the pilot 2-day workshop see Hayward & Basset, 2002; Cooke, 2003)
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