Involving users/carers in mental health care-planning is central to international policy initiatives yet users frequently report feeling excluded from the care planning process. Rigorous explorations of mental health professionals’ experiences of care planning are lacking, limiting our understanding of this important translational gap.
Objectives
To explore professional perceptions of delivering collaborative mental health care-planning and involving service users and carers in their care.
Design
Qualitative interviews and focus groups with data combined and subjected to framework analysis.
Setting
UK secondary care mental health services.
Participants
51 multi-disciplinary professionals involved in care planning and recruited via study advertisements.
Results
Emergent themes identified care-planning as a meaningful platform for user/carer involvement but revealed philosophical tensions between user involvement and professional accountability. Professionals emphasised their individual, relational skills as a core facilitator of involvement, highlighting some important deficiencies in conventional staff training programmes.
Conclusions
Although internationally accepted on philosophical grounds, user-involved care-planning is poorly defined and lacks effective implementation support. Its full realisation demands greater recognition of both the historical and contemporary contexts in which statutory mental healthcare occurs.