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How Do Patients, Carers and Mental Health Nurses Experience Their Contact With the Forensic Multidisciplinary Team in a Medium-Secure Unit? a Thematic Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2023

Alexander Jack
Affiliation:
University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, United Kingdom
Eleanor Parkinson
Affiliation:
Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Talhah Malik
Affiliation:
Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham, United Kingdom
Stephen Hemblade
Affiliation:
Priory Group, London, United Kingdom
Fiona Hynes
Affiliation:
Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham, United Kingdom
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Abstract

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Aims

Clinical teams oversee the care of patients within secure psychiatric inpatient settings. They are made up of a number of professions, including psychiatrists, psychologists, occupational therapists, social workers and nurses. The effective collaboration of the different members of the clinical team is vital for its functioning. However, so is the team's interface with other key stakeholder groups, namely nursing teams, service users and carers. Understanding the needs and priorities of these groups regarding their relationships with the clinical team is also important to recognise and in the provision of good quality care. To understand the experiences, priorities and needs of stakeholder groups in their relationship with the clinical team. Gaining feedback from multiple sources (service users, carers, nurses) will help facilitate functioning of the clinical team in the delivery of excellent care to service users.

Methods

Ethical approval was granted by the host NHS trust. Between October 2019 and October 2021, three focus groups were conducted using a semi-structured interview to gather responses from carers, nurses and service users (6 participants in each group) respectively. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. Thematic analysis was used to code each transcript and themes were drawn from the coded data.

Results

Dominant themes emerged from the three data sets. Consistent themes between groups included communication, hierarchy/power and representation. There were also differences in themes identified, with the carer group bringing the theme of education/ knowledge, and nursing group raising the value of human relationships, including compassion. The theme of transparency emerged strongly for the service user group.

Conclusion

This study offers an interesting perspective on what distinct stakeholder groups want and value in their relationship with the clinical team. Gaining feedback from multiple sources (service users, carers, nurses and members of the MDT) can better inform a team about its functioning and help improve performance. Developing a tool to aid the systematic collection of multi-source feedback is the next step of this project, facilitating the voices of key stakeholder groups to be heard.

Type
Research
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NC
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This does not need to be placed under each abstract, just each page is fine.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Royal College of Psychiatrists

Footnotes

Abstracts were reviewed by the RCPsych Academic Faculty rather than by the standard BJPsych Open peer review process and should not be quoted as peer-reviewed by BJPsych Open in any subsequent publication.

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