Future of mental health services rely on innovative training and recruitment
A report, published yesterday by the Mental Health Foundation sets out the key messages as to what mental health services need to do in order to ensure that they are ready to address the mental health needs of the UK population in 20-30 years’ time.
The year-long Inquiry into the future of mental health services was co-chaired by Professor Dinesh Bhugra from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London.
The report indicated that mental health services are currently straining at the seams. Yet they face even greater pressures in the future, including a growing, and ageing, population; persistently high prevalence rates of mental disorders among adults and children; increasing levels of co-morbid mental and physical health problems; and funding constraints that are likely to last for many years.
Professor Ian Norman, a member of the Inquiry Panel and Deputy Head of the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery, King’s College London, spoke at the Launch. He said:
“It is clear from the report that everyone in the mental health workforce needs to have the capability and motivation to form positive relationships with people with mental health difficulties and their supporters.”
He called for a greater use of group work exercises, to identify indicators of positive and negative attitudes and values for the recruitment of mental health professionals. He also called for all education programmes for mental health professionals to be grounded in humanistic counselling principles and that these should underpin every interaction with people with mental health difficulties and their supporters, and be the basis for subsequent skills development.
Professor Norman outlined these principles as: “genuineness (that the client experiences the mental health worker as they really are); unconditional positive regard (accepting the person as they are, irrespective of their actions); empathy (a spirit of enquiry and ability to understand what the patient is feeling and going through); compassion (going beyond empathy to incorporate motivation to do something to alleviate suffering).
“The other quality that all mental health workers need is the ability to manage, or ‘contain’, the distress experienced in the moment by people with mental health difficulties and foster hope.”
Professor Norman also pointed to the potential of inter-professional education to foster collaboration between professionals, something he sees as necessary to run coordinated services, but said “the evidence base for inter-professional education is weak. We know that it can have benefits for patients and increases collaboration between professionals – but there are very few studies which have compared the results of inter-professional education with profession-specific education and we don’t yet know what key elements of inter-professional education are most effective”.
He further advocated a much larger role for mental health service users to be involved directly in the education of mental health care professionals.
“Aside from the important insights that mental health service users provide by sharing their experiences with student mental health professionals Service user involvement in education is important because of the issue of public stigma of mental illness. Mental health professionals are not immune to stereotypes of mental illness and we need to tackle stigma at this point as a first step.
“What we know from the evaluation of the Time to Change Programme [an anti-stigma campaign run by the mental health charities Mind and Rethink Mental Illness] is that the immediate positive effects of anti-stigma training on the attitudes of medical students do not appear to endure over time. The best bet for combating stigma is probably positive social contact between service users and the involvement of service users in mental health professionals’ training is one way to achieve this”
Finally, he called for a ‘generic-led, specialist supported’ mental health service and for a greater presence for mental health nurses in the primary care workforce so they can provide prompt assistance to people with serious and enduring mental illness, to avert their progress to secondary care.
A copy of the Mental Health Foundation's report, The future of mental health services can be found here.
For more information, contact:
Oliver Stannard
Communications Officer
Florence Nightingale School of Nursing & Midwifery, King’s College London
T: 020 7848 3062
E: oliver.stannard@kcl.ac.uk