Experiences of Psychological Support in Inpatient Settings
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Service User and Staff Experiences of the Provision of Psychological Support in an Inpatient Mental Health Setting
IRAS ID
171378
Contact name
Vyv Huddy
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University College London
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 2 months, 30 days
Research summary
Acute inpatient care remains a significant component of mental health services. Recently, service users have called for improved access to psychological therapy in acute inpatient settings (MIND, 2012), which repeated an earlier call from a policy perspective (Healthcare Commission, 2008). There are, however, a range of potential barriers to delivery of psychological interventions in inpatient care environment, including the impact of the short-term stay on existing psychological therapies but research is yet to substantiate these issues. This program of research therefore aims to evaluate service user and clinician experiences of psychological interventions and other forms of informal support to improve theoretical and clinical approaches to psychological therapies in the acute inpatient setting.
The research program will explore several perspectives on psychological support via semi-structured interviews. Transcripts of interviews will be analysed thematically, generating rich themes from each perspective. The first perspective will be gathered from separate interviews with service users who have not received psychological input and their named ward staff. These will explore patients’ experience of seeking informal support in inpatient setting . The second, will involve interviews with both service users who have received formal psychological therapy and also their therapist. These will concern experiences of undertaking psychological work, what is helpful/unhelpful, and the impact of the acute inpatient environment. Finally, service users and therapists who have undertaken a novel therapy approach - Method of Levels (MoL) - will be interviewed to determine the acceptability and feasibility of this intervention. We expect all interviews to be less than one hour.
Participants will be a minimum 18 years of age, have a sufficient understanding of written and spoken English to participate in interviews and not are experiencing symptoms such as mania, acute tension or hostility, or have a significant learning disability that impacts their ability to participate in an interview. We expect the research to take place over a period of 24 months.REC name
East Midlands - Derby Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/EM/0263
Date of REC Opinion
9 Jul 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion