Mental health service user involvement in nurse education: exploring the issues

TLDR

The study aims to promote mental health service users’ involvement in a preregistration nursing curriculum by exploring users’ views on required knowledge, skills, attributes, and strategies for sustained active participation. Researchers gathered users’ perspectives on essential competencies and long‑term engagement strategies to inform curriculum design and delivery. Findings reveal conflicts between user and professional conceptions of a good mental health nurse, question participant representativeness, discuss involvement versus tokenism, and offer recommendations for achieving active user participation.

Abstract

This paper reports on findings and issues arising from a study designed to promote mental health service users' involvement in a preregistration nursing curriculum. Users' views about the knowledge, skills and attributes required by mental health nurses were explored to inform the curriculum design. Strategies that would facilitate long term, active user involvement in the design and delivery of the curriculum were also explored. Findings are presented with concurrent discussion of issues arising from the research process in relation to user involvement in education. The issue of 'conflict' explores findings relating to users' views of a 'good' mental health nurse and inherent conflicts between user and professional views are highlighted. The representativeness of the research participants is explored and debated in relation to service user involvement in nurse education. Finally, the concepts of 'involvement' and 'tokenism' are discussed and recommendations made about how active user involvement in nurse education can be achieved.