Category: Nursing

Research priorities for mental health nursing

Last week’s arrival in my email inbox of the notes taken at Mental Health Nurse Academics UK‘s most recent meeting, held on October 8th at Teesside University, reminds me that MHNAUK is still conducting a research priorities exercise. These minutes, taken by Joy Duxbury and circulated by Michael Coffey, note that Len Bowers led our discussions on the day and has offered to collate responses:

The group discussed the scope of future research for the profession of mental health nursing. The idea is to develop research priorities to influence what research gets funded and funders will be interested to hear about this. The priority setting exercise included discussions on the following:

  • The role of the mental health nurse – What works and what doesn’t? What we are good at and what we aren’t so good at.
  • The role of theory as well as empirical research – how does this influence funders and how research might still be theory driven?
  • What do mental health nurses contribute that aids recovery?
  • Transitions
  • Care co-ordination
  • Does it have to be unique to mental health nursing? Maybe not
  • Underpinning values
  • Public Health

As there seemed to be problems with consensus e.g. defining what counts as mental health nursing research as opposed to mental health research of relevance to nursing it was felt that we need first to feedback top ten priorities for research to Len before Christmas. He will then collate to discuss at a future meeting. It might also help if we report what research we are currently doing too.

Meanwhile, over on MHNAUK’s blog there’s this post from Alan Simpson to kick-start this exercise off, and room for people to add their thoughts beneath via the comments function. In his ‘starter for 26’ Alan writes:

Inspired by last week’s MHNAUK meeting, today staff at our mental health research team meeting were asked to identify their research priorities for mental health nursing research. The meeting consists of various academic research staff and clinical academics discussing on-going and forthcoming research studies and various research-related issues. Today, I simply asked each person to write a short list of priorities, which we then shared and discussed. Here’s our Top 30 in no particular order with repeats removed. Most frequent repeat was physical healthcare. Second was recovery. Third – racism and culture. What’s your Top 10?

  1. Generic vs Specialist MHN training
  2. Measures of Compassion
  3. Effects of selection procedures for MHN students and staff
  4. Nursing and PTSD
  5. Tool development
  6. Risk assessment and MHN
  7. The 6 Cs and MHN
  8. Mental capacity and issues of consent
  9. Racism and stigma in MHN
  10. Values and beliefs and how they impact on practice
  11. Mental health and the performing arts
  12. MHN training and learning disabilities
  13. MHN views on developments that may threaten MHN, e.g. peer support, self-care
  14. Physical healthcare in secondary mental health care settings
  15. Philosophy and MHN: The Art of Living
  16. Identity and body image in people with MI
  17. Community and third sector organisations and how they link with mental health teams/services
  18. Communication, especially information giving and the first contact
  19. Culture and ‘cultural safety’ as a useful model
  20. Fear – underpinning MHN and service user behaviours
  21. Brokerage roles, self-care and MHN
  22. Workforce planning and nurse education/training and physical/mental health divide
  23. Evaluation of education/training and preparation of MHNs for the job
  24. Recovery and MHN interventions
  25. MHN interventions to maximise engagement
  26. Liaison mental health care

We’re looking to conduct an informal exercise of this type amongst Cardiff University’s mental health nurse academics, with a view to forwarding our collective ideas to Michael Coffey for wider incorporation. Ahead of this, here are some initial suggestions of my own, which I’ll also add to the MHNAUK blog:

  1. What do mental health nurses do?
  2. What do/can mental health nurses do which promotes recovery and individually tailored care?
  3. What do/can mental health nurses do to better promote physical health and well-being in people with severe and enduring mental health difficulties?
  4. What do/can nurses do to help people in their journeys into, through and out of the mental health system?
  5. What are mental health nursing values, and what difference do/can they make?
  6. How are/should students of mental health nursing be prepared for practice?
  7. How can nurses use new technologies to improve care and its organisation?
  8. What are the intended and unintended consequences of organisational and therapeutic innovation on the experiences of people both using, and providing, mental health services?

These are all ideas occurring this evening, though it’s also true to say most reflect lines of inquiry I’m fortunate enough to already be associated with. More to follow, perhaps.

Catching up post

Plenty going on in the last week or so. I had the chance to join pre-registration mental health nurses and occupational therapists for a second day as they made preparations for an interprofessional event scheduled for early December. Some of these students have also been giving me drafts of assessed work to comment on, but as the deadline for receipt of these is first thing next week I expect a deluge then. ’twas ever thus.

Elsewhere there has been RiSC reviewing to crack on with, assignment marking, and peer review reports to both consider and write. I’ve also put myself in the frame to act as a reviewer for another university’s proposed new MSc mental health programme, this being the kind of curriculum work I haven’t had the chance to do for a while.

I’m not normally one for formal, suit-and-boot, events, but made an exception last Wednesday (November 27th) to join a posse of colleagues from the School of Healthcare Sciences at the RCN Wales Nurse of the Year awards. These took place at Cardiff City Hall, and the overall winner was Cardiff and Vale UHB ward sister Ruth Owens. Congratulations, Ruth. Congratulations, too, to the individual category winners: including Andy Lodwick (also from Cardiff and Vale) for picking up the Mental Health and Learning Disabilities award and Dr Carolyn Middleton, doctoral graduate from what was the Cardiff School of Nursing and Midwifery Studies, for winning the Research in Nursing award.

This week also brought me to a meeting of the MHRNC Service User and Carer Partnership Research Development Group and, yesterday morning, to the Cardiff City Stadium for an open meeting to discuss NISCHR’s infrastructure and programme funding review. Both were lively events, and on the NISCHR front I see big changes ahead from 2015.

And to close this summary post: via the twitter grapevine I see that the RCN is now giving early notification of the Network for Psychiatric Nursing Research 2014 conference. This will take place at Warwick University on the 18th and 19th of September. I’ll post a link to the call for abstracts once this appears, but for now will reproduce this extract from the event website:

This year [2014] is the 20th international NPNR conference and it’s going to be a celebration.

We wish to celebrate and promote some of the outstanding mental health nursing research that shapes mental health policy and nursing practice across the world. We will also acknowledge some of the best psychiatric and mental health nursing research that helped create the strong foundation for our work today. And we will invite delegates to look ahead to map out the future for mental health nursing research, education and practice.

Doughnut meetings

My esteemed colleague Professor Jane Hopkinson facilitates a Wednesday lunchtime research drop-in, to which people in the School of Healthcare Sciences at Cardiff University are invited. Affectionately known as doughnut meetings (see photo of today’s goodies attached), these provide a loosely-structured, supportive, space for the sharing of ideas and experiences. The gatherings are really very good: informal, but always informed. I make a point of getting along when I can.

Typically those who meet up get to propose themes for future meetings. This afternoon’s topic was ‘research and evaluation’, and more particularly the distinctions between the two. People involved in health services research (or indeed, health services evaluation) will know how important this differentiation is for NHS governance and approval purposes. Projects classified as ‘research’ require independent NHS research ethics committee (REC) approval. Projects classified as ‘evaluation’ do not. The NHS Health Research Authority provides guidance to help people work out what type of project it is that they are proposing, but in my experience making these determinations remains a wholly inexact science.

I have also learned that a project can be ‘evaluation’ in one context (e.g., for NHS research governance and ethics review) and ‘research’ in another (e.g., for academic progression and award purposes). My own PhD was designed, part-funded through open competition, completed and examined as ‘research’: what else could it possibly have been, as a research degree? But it was also categorised as something else when I offered it up for NHS REC approval, as I’ve written about here and (at length) in this paper.

So there we have it. Potentially all rather confusing, and certainly enough to make me want to eat a doughnut.

Postgraduate symposium

Tomorrow I’m off to the School of Healthcare Sciences’ first-ever Postgraduate Research Student symposium, taking place in the grand surroundings of Cardiff University’s Glamorgan Building.

This has given me the perfect excuse to find out, once and for all, the particular meaning of the word ‘symposium’ (as opposed to ‘colloquium’, for example). So for those interested (which won’t be many of you, I’m sure), the Collins English Dictionary defines ‘symposium’ thus:

  1. a conference or meeting for the discussion of some subject, esp an academic topic or social problem
  2. a collection of scholarly contributions, usually published together, on a given subject
  3. (in classical Greece) a drinking party with intellectual conversation, music, etc

A ‘colloquium’, on the other hand, is:

  1. an informal gathering for discussion
  2. an academic seminar

I’m glad that’s sorted. Looking at the third definition of ‘symposium’ above, and then at the organising committee’s Socratic quotation reproduced in the flyer at the top, I now realise I ought to prepare for an event in the ancient Greek style. I may bring my guitar, all the better to join in with.

Standard professions?

The Times Higher Education reports this week on comments made by Vince Cable at an event hosted by the Sutton Trust. According to the THE, the Business Secretary:

[…] has criticised the “qualification inflation” that means entrants to “very standard” professions such as nursing require a degree.

In truth I find the THE‘s report a little disjointed, as elsewhere it quotes Vince Cable on a host of other matters including private schooling, support for postgraduate study and the promotion of social mobility.

But I understand enough of it to take issue with the Business Secretary’s side-swipe at graduate nurses. On what grounds might we distinguish ‘standard’ from ‘elite’ professions, or sustain the argument that only those joining the latter must of necessity possess degrees? We await an explanation. In the meantime, for a considered review of nursing education I refer readers to the report of the Willis Commission, which I wrote about on this blog last year. For a research-oriented post on the division of labour in health care (and particularly, on professions in the mental health field), try this post.

Mental health services at a time of austerity

Last week I drafted a short, commentary-type, paper for a special edition of Mental Health Nursing which will be focusing on practice and services during a time of austerity. Some years ago I was on the editorial board of MHN. I’m pleased to learn that having disappeared from the library shelves in favour of becoming an online journal (available only to members of Unite the Union) it has made a return in traditional paper form. I’ve been sent a stack of copies, which I’ll be distributing to students.

Anyway: no sooner had I completed my draft and sent it onwards than yesterday’s big health and social care story broke. Under the banner England’s mental health services ‘in crisis’ the BBC ran a report drawing on a joint investigation conducted with Community Care magazine. The headlines were sobering, suggesting over 1,500 mental health hospital beds being lost since April 2011. These bald figures were illustrated with personal stories, revealing people needing crisis admission being transferred to wherever beds could be found around the country, and wards running at over 100% occupancy.

This is very bad news, and suggests a shrinkage back to the way things last were in the early to mid 1990s. In writing my paper for MHN I fished out my copy of this article by David McDaid and Martin Knapp, in which the point is made that at times of economic hardship demand for mental health care increases. And yet, as we are finding, services are actually retracting as austerity bites.

Classroom time

This morning I’ll be in a classroom urging a group of post-registration community nurses to embrace the idea that mental health is everybody’s business. It’s a session I regularly get to do on the School of Healthcare Sciences’ Fundamentals of Community Practice module. We’ll be looking at rates of mental ill-health within populations, and at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines on depression. We’ll also get to think about what district nurses, health visitors and others can do to promote mental health in their day-to-day work.

This is a session where I additionally get to introduce people to Healthtalkonline. This is an excellent resource for everyone: teachers, practitioners, service users and carers. Here’s how it describes itself:

People’s stories: see, hear and read their experiences…

Healthtalkonline is the award-winning website of the DIPEx charity. Healthtalkonline and its sister website, Youthhealthtalk, let you share in more than 2,000 people’s experiences of over 60 health-related conditions and illnesses. You can watch video or listen to audio clips of the interviews, read about people’s experiences if you prefer and find reliable information about specific conditions, treatment choices and support.

The information on Healthtalkonline relies on external funding and is based on qualitative research into health experiences, led by experts at the University of Oxford. These personal stories of health and illness will enable patients, families, carers and healthcare professionals to benefit from the experiences of others.

Healthtalkonline has a repository of clips in which people talk about their personal experiences of mental health difficulties. I have it on good authority that there is more on the way, too, so this is a site to keep coming back to.

Supporting doctoral students in mental health nursing

Over on the Mental Health Nurse Academics UK blog, Julia Terry from Swansea University has written a post introducing the new Mental Health Nurse Doctoral Students’ Network which she has worked so hard to convene. The group met, for the first time, as part of an NPNR conference fringe at Warwick University last month.

Here’s what Julia has to say:

Welcome to the first official blog post for the:

paperchain people

 Mental Health Nurse Doctoral Students’ Network

At the NPNR in Warwick this year 10 Mental Health Nurse Doctoral Students came forward and agreed that a network was a good idea.

This network can work in a number of ways:

  • Meeting up for occasional face to face discussions
  • Using an email group to contact like-minded people
  • And using this blog

You may have questions, tips to share, events and books to recommend, the possibilities are wide.

As you’re reading this we’ve now increased the network to 24 interested doctoral students already, so the interest seems to be there. Thanks for your support.

Top tip:

2 great books I read from start to finish and keep going back to –

Petre, M., Rugg, G. (2010) The unwritten rules of PhD research. 2nd ed. Berkshire: Open University Press

Phillips, E., Pugh, D. (2010) How to get a PhD: a handbook for students and their supervisors.  Berkshire: Open University Press

I found them very easy to read, and good to dip in and out of. Tips about writing, planning your time, supervision, etc..Well worth a read.

Bw, Julia Terry

Great work, Julia: I hope people get involved.

Whilst I’m on the topic of postgraduate research, I note that the European Academy of Nursing Science (of which I am a Fellow) runs a doctoral student summer school for nurse researchers. There’s also the Academy of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting Research with its mentorship scheme.

Teesside story

So here’s a brief post from a train, as I make my way home from Mental Health Nurse Academics UK‘s meeting at Teesside University. The journey is long, but the company is good: next to me is Michael Coffey, and in front are Linda Cooper and Julia Terry.

The day has been an interesting one. Len Bowers reprised findings from his Safewards trial (and very important they are, too). Ian Hulatt and Joy Duxbury led a discussion on positive behavioural support. PBS? Not something I know much about, I have to confess. The possibility of establishing research priorities for mental health nursing was also explored. I now realise, as I type, that a discussion on Twitter is taking place on what these priorities might be. A similar round is taking place on themes for future MHNAUK meetings. Time to dive in, perhaps?

MHNAUK meeting at Teesside University

This afternoon I’m off to Darlington (a place I’ve never visited before) ahead of tomorrow’s Mental Health Nurse Academics UK (MHNAUK) meeting. As a reminder, MHNAUK’s website can be found here, and its blog can be found here.

This is going to be a considerable train journey (check out the map below), so I’ll be bringing work to be getting on with and plenty of light refreshments. The other thing I’ll be doing en route is catching up with friends and colleagues, where in the course of a normal working week it can be difficult to find time to converse.

The meeting itself is being hosted by Gordon Mitchell from Teesside University, and is being chaired by Michael Coffey. Taken from the MHNAUK website here is the agenda:

9.15 – 10.00 Arrival and Refreshments

10.00 – 10.10 Welcome from the Chair and Introductions – Michael Coffey

10.10 – 10.20 Welcome to the School and Teesside University – Dean Prof Paul Keane OBE

10.20 – 10.50 Safewards and coercion – Professor Len Bowers

10.50 – 11.20 Department of Health commissioned report on physical interventions – Ian Hulatt, RCN Mental Health Nurse Advisor and Professor Joy Duxbury

11.20 – Discussion re MHNAUK statement on research and education in physical interventions

11.30-11.45 Comfort Break

Main Business

11.45-12.45 Research Priority Setting: a proposal – Professor Len Bowers

Lunch and Networking

13.15 – 13.45 Revisiting Cardiff Proposals – Michael Coffey

13.45 – 14.00 Mental Health Nurse recruitment and selection – Enkanah Soobadoo

14.00 -14.15 NPNR News – Michael Coffey

14.15 – 14.25 Feedback on Academy of Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting Research – Professor Alan Simpson

14.25 – 14.35 Mental Health Nurse Metrics – Sue McAndrew

14.35 – 14.45 MHNAUK statement on Dementia care, education and research – Grahame Smith

14.45 – 14.50 Doctoral student network: fringe event at NPNR – Julia Terry

14.50 AOB – Mental Health Nursing history archive – Michael Coffey and MHNAUK new journal discussions – Ben Hannigan

15.00 Close of Meeting