Measuring What Matters to Young People in Inpatient Mental Health Care
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Measuring What Matters to Young People in Inpatient Mental Health Services: The development of a questionnaire
IRAS ID
343607
Contact name
Trishna Patel
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of East London
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 10 months, 8 days
Research summary
Currently, professionals in UK inpatient child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) have noticed that feedback through the use of standardised questionnaires is not being routinely gathered. The lack of an adequate and meaningful feedback questionnaire for young people's experiences in inpatient mental health services has been highlighted (Clark & MacLennan, 2023). The authors reference the work of Liebling and colleagues (2011), which involved developing a measure that assesses the quality of life in prisons focusing on moral and relational aspects.
Factors impacting life in prison include similar themes to the ones young people find affect their experiences in inpatient settings and align with human rights: e.g., the level of respect, trust, support, safety and fairness (Curtice & Exworthy, 2010; Liebling et al., 2011; Sharville, 2019; Waldegrave & Roffe, 2020). Additionally, existing questionnaires do not include questions around discrimination which would be important to include given reports of young people's experiences (Sharville, 2019; Vidal et al., 2020). A questionnaire that centres young people's voices and follows a human rights framework could be useful and meaningful as part of quality monitoring and feedback processes in inpatient CAMHS.
This study aims to investigate how well a new questionnaire of moral and relational dimensions captures the quality of experience in tier 4 inpatient CAMHS in comparison with an existing questionnaire. The new questionnaire has been developed in consultation with young people and professionals.
The study would seek the participation of young people who have current or previous experience of being in UK inpatient mental health services while being under 18 years old to complete and give their views on the new questionnaire alongside 1 existing questionnaire.
This study would be the first stage in the development of a new questionnaire that could be used across inpatient CAMHS to evaluate the quality of experiences and identify potential areas of improvement.
REC name
Yorkshire & The Humber - Bradford Leeds Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
25/YH/0059
Date of REC Opinion
20 Mar 2025
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion