Co-Produced Mental Health Nursing Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

Co-Produced Mental Health Nursing Education

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2016

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Quality and Relevance of Higher Education in Partner Countries; Health and wellbeing; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses

Project Summary

Service user involvement is an essential component for promoting recovery orientated mental health services and has been strongly advocated both by international medical institutions and service users’ organizations. Several universities in Europe have adopted this approach to nursing education and recruited service users to participate in mental health nursing education. One aim of this approach is to encourage students to adopt a recovery oriented approach, rather than an illness oriented approach to practice. This reflects the requirements of modern mental health services. Only the first steps have been taken in this direction and the universities participating in Commune project are at different levels in this development. Therefore our first objective was to co-produce teaching material in mental health nursing with equal contribution from service users’ educators and nurse academics. This coproduced approach to developing teaching materials has not, to our best knowledge, been tried before. To take the concept of co-production further, and train and empower the service users’ educators, they were responsible for the teaching of the teaching module that was co-produced. Throughout this process we aimed at giving the less experienced universities and service users educators an opportunity to learn from the more experienced ones.
Furthermore, In Europe and Australia, there is a growing need for mental health care and hence increasing opportunity for nurses to pursue a career in mental health nursing. However mental health nursing is not a popular career choice. Therefore the second objective was to encourage nursing students to consider a career in mental health nursing by providing them with the opportunity to understand the experience of mental distress from the perspective of the service users.
Seven Universities in five European countries and Australia took part in the project. These are all higher education institution at tertiary level. Collaborating organisations were the local mental health care users’ organisations in the home cities of the participating universities.
The projects activities had three main components. (1) The development and the teaching of a co-produced learning module in mental health recovery. The module was taught by 18 service users to 825 BS-level nursing students in all participating universities. (2) The assessment/outcome of the teaching and other research activities. Qualitative research was undertaken to gain valuable service user perspectives as preparation of the development of the learning module. The impact of the module on both students and service users educators was evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative methods. (3) The development of a Best Practice Handbook that will offer mental health nursing academics and service user educators guidance in implementing the learning module or similar modules in the future.
Teaching the learning module positively impacted both the nursing students and the Experts by Experience as the assessment studies have shown. The students became more exceptive of the social and institutional inclusion of people labelled with mental health illnesses and felt they were better prepared for a career in the mental health field (Happell, et al., 2018). The service users educators felt empowered by the teaching and better prepared for future teaching activities. Three papers that came out of the project have already been published, two are under review and more have been drafted. The project and its outcomes have been presented in numerous national and international conferences. Furthermore, the project has given the participants from different countries an opportunity to learn from each other. The participating universities and user movements are on different levels of service users educators involvement and the project gave the novices opportunity to learn from those more experienced.
On the basis of our evaluations, observations and feedback, we strongly believe the project will have long-term benefits both locally and internationally. The positive findings will be used to encourage other universities to embed service users educators within their curricula, and will encourage the participating universities to strengthen their service users educators involvement. By conducting the project transnationally we hope to ensure that the teaching material and the experience of its development and implementation will have relevance beyond the countries involved and can be adapted to the needs of nursing educators in different countries. To achieve this a Best Practice Handbook which describes the process of the project and the learning module is available for all at the projects homepage: https://www.commune.hi.is

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 203324 Eur

Project Coordinator

HASKOLI ISLANDS & Country: IS

Project Partners

• Stichting Hogeschool Utrecht
• TURUN AMMATTIKORKEAKOULU OY
• University of Canberra
• HØGSKOLEN I HEDMARK (HIHM)
• UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK – NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, CORK
• DUBLIN CITY UNIVERSITY