Service user and carer involvement in learning and teaching: A faculty of health staff perspective
Introduction
This paper reports one strand of a larger evaluation project, initiated by a Service User and Carer Education Partnership group (SUCEP) in a Faculty of Health. The remit of the group was to evaluate the impact of service user and carer involvement in learning and teaching and to devise ways of achieving sustainable, meaningful learning partnerships between service users, carers, academics and learners.
Service user and carer involvement in the education of health and social care professionals has become expected practice. Department of Health, 2005, Department of Health, 2007a, Department of Health, 2008 is driving a patient-led culture and this requires the workforce to develop the appropriate communication and negotiation skills, and different ways of working (Hawley, 2005). Although the benefits to learning have been identified in a number of studies (e.g. Barnes et al., 2006, Stevens and Tanner, 2006, Khoo et al., 2004), as yet there is little evidence of service user involvement achieving sustainable impact on the student learning experience. There is evidence of tokenistic involvement (e.g. Barnes et al., 2006, Felton and Stickley, 2004, Locket et al., 2004, Forrest et al., 2000) and this is in contrast to the vision expressed by Trent NHS SHA (2005) and the values explicit in World Class Commissioning (DoH, 2007b, p. 1).
Social Work programmes are already required to demonstrate service user and carer involvement in every aspect of their learning and teaching, and other professional bodies are likely to follow this example. Therefore, higher education (HE) providers need to demonstrate how service user and carer involvement conveys added value to the student experience across different dimensions of their function, such as curriculum design, teaching delivery, recruitment and selection, and assessment of students. However, even with political will, achieving integration and seamless processes to support involvement is a challenging enterprise for all concerned. Studies of service user participation highlight the organisational barriers arising throughout the process. For example, Brown and Young (2008) discuss some of the barriers created by administrative issues. Stevens and Tanner (2006) found that creative systems and infrastructures are necessary to support meaningful involvement. Additionally, Morgan and Jones (2009) report that very few studies incorporate the views of staff within HE regarding service user involvement.
This paper reports one facet of an overarching study which evaluated the impact of service user and carer involvement on learning and teaching in a Faculty of Health. The aims of the research were:
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to consider current evidence of impact on learning and teaching within the Faculty;
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to identify strategies for achieving effective partnerships between learners, practice, education, and service users and carers to enable meaningful impact in the future.
This paper seeks to illuminate the gap identified by Morgan and Jones (2009) by eliciting the views of frontline academic and administrative staff. The research questions for this part of the study were:
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How are service users and carers involved in the curriculum at present?
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What is the ideal level of involvement for the future? Is it the same in all programmes?
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What are the barriers to involvement?
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What good practice solutions exist?
Section snippets
Method
As this part of the study sought to elicit the little known views of staff (Morgan and Jones, 2009), a qualitative inquiry was appropriate. All the aspects of the research design and questions were evolved through consultation and collaboration within the SUCEP group. From this, a semi-structured interview schedule was constructed, which incorporated the Ladder of Involvement adapted from Tew et al. (2004). The entire interview schedule is included in Appendix A.
Quality reports, university
Results and discussion
Following a convention common in qualitative inquiry, the results and discussion are synthesised. Quotes are derived from the interviews with staff. The annotation in brackets indicates the chronology of the interview. The themes that emerged were, to some extent, informed by the semi-structured nature of the interview. Nevertheless, it was apparent that most of the respondents were concerned with barriers and solutions, and because these were the dominant themes that emerged they form the
Conclusion
This was a qualitative study so the findings cannot be generalised to the whole health and social care education sector. Despite the careful consent procedures, respondents may have felt inhibited by the possible implications of criticising their own organisation. However, their evidence supports much of the current research. Finally, the scope of this paper precludes detailed discussion of every theme arising from this part of the study. Nevertheless, the overall perspective of the respondents
Acknowledgement
The project was funded by the CETL project, Birmingham City University.
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