Service users

Social Role Valorisation theory, advanced to enhance the lives of disadvantaged groups of people, has addressed community care and lay advocacy for patients and users but has ignored the roles of relatives and carers. [In this article, the term ‘patient’ is used to describe a person who is detained under the Mental Health Act, liable to be detained, or in hospital on an informal basis.

A short video aimed at health professionals which features a number of professionals, patients and carers, who talk about how a more personalised approach to care can improve outcomes.

The author, a service user with schizophrenia,  discusses how she can utilize her position and produce research that is acceptable, reliable, and credible. She discusses this in relation to a research proposal to examine the role of the carer in the recovery process of people with schizophrenia.

The systematic review methodology literature refers to the importance of involving stakeholders, including service users and carers, in the research. However, compared with other aspects of the methodology, this aspect of conducting systematic reviews is underdeveloped and the practice of involvement appears highly variable. This article draws on the experience of working with service users and carers in one systematic review to review the barriers to participation and the components of effective involvement.

Direct payments can now be made to older people. But a 12-month research project has revealed that service users, carers and junior staff still have little knowledge of them. The authors of the Shield research team, Anglia Polytechnic University, and Tower Hamlets Coalition of Disabled People explain that service users are cautiously optimistic about what direct payments offer them but are anxious about the practicalities.

This article will reflect on the experience of undertaking a participatory action research influenced study within a module of a social work degree programme. In doing so it will touch on some of the literature associated with student, service user and carer involvement in qualifying programmes, and in particular on research and module design. It will outline the history of service user and carer involvement in respect of a specific module within a singular degree course.

The LEAP (learning, evaluation and planning) framework is a toolkit designed to support a partnership approach to achieving change and improvement in the quality of community life. It has been used by policy makers, practitioners, and community activists in the fields of health education; adult learning; volunteering; and environmental planning. The framework will be of interest to anyone interested in using a partnership approach to improving outcomes for communities, service users and carers.

Health workers in Barnsley have found that training can help counter tokenism in user and carer involvement in the planning and delivering of services. Looks at the training course delivered to service users and carers which included: developing participants' skills in writing and evaluating standards; and de-mystifying jargon.

The model of assertive outreach is one of the most internationally researched areas of community mental healthcare. An assertive outreach team at a mental health trust developed a handbook on the model, involving contributions from service users, carers, local clinicians and the voluntary sector. This article outlines the process of developing the handbook, and summarises its content and user feedback.