Marian Barnes and Dee MacDonald will be working with colleagues from the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at Kings College and from Imperial College on a new research project studying developments in mental health service user involvement in England. The project is funded by the National Institute for Health Research Service Delivery and Organisation programme. The principal investigator is Dr Diana Rose, Reader in User Led Research at IoP and the project is a partnership also involving:
- Rethink
- South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLAM)
- Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE)
- Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust
- Central and North West London Foundation Trust (CNWL)
The project, entitled 'ENSUE: Evaluating National developments in Service User involvement in England', aims to examine how managers within mental health services have responded to user involvement activities and to identify how they facilitate or impede effective patient and public involvement. There is little literature on what the impacts of user involvement activities have been, especially in terms of the responses of key decision-makers.
The research will also look at the changing face of user involvement in mental health, where models based in collective organisation by service users may be giving way to more of a focus on individual involvement. This includes making individual choices about services using personal budgets and participation as user governors in Foundation Trusts.
The research will last for two years.
The first stage of the study will involve interviews with managers and clinicians, and questionnaires to service users to get their views on the impact of service user involvement. The second stage will adopt an ethnographic approach to studying the work of specific user groups within the three Trusts, studies of the experiences of user governors, and of the way in which users and user led organisations are experiencing involvement in the context of personalisation. In a final phase of the study deliberative workshops will be held to explore stakeholder responses to study findings.
