Working with families affected by mental distress: stakeholders' perceptions of mental health nurses educational needs

Family and informal caregivers provide a substantial amount of care and support to people who experience mental health problems. The aim of this study was to explore mental health nurses’, students’ and service users’ perceptions of the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are required by mental health nurses to work with families and carers using a qualitative methodology. Three themes emerged from the data: Knowledge of the family and how mental distress affects the family; Working with the family – support and education and Valuing the role of the family. The three themes demonstrate the complexity of preparing mental health nurses to work with families and carers and the paper offers recommendations about how this might be achieved

A vision for change: Report of the Expert Group on Mental Health Policy (2006)

This report, the first comprehensive review of mental health policy since 'Planning for the Future' was published in 1984, makes a series of recommendations for the mental health services, including the closure of all psychiatric hospitals and re-investment of the resources into a community-based mental health service.This resource was contributed by The National Documentation Centre on Drug Use

Validation of a 28-item version of the Systemic Clinical Outcome and Routine Evaluation in an Irish context: The SCORE-28

This paper describes the development, in an Irish context, of a 3-factor, 28-item version the Systemic Clinical Outcome and Routine Evaluation (SCORE) questionnaire for assessing progress in family therapy. The 40-item version of the SCORE was administered to over 700 Irish participants including non-clinical adolescents and young adults, families attending family therapy, and parents of young people with physical and intellectual disabilities and cystic fibrosis. For validation purposes, data were also collected using brief measures of family and personal adjustment. A 28-item version of the SCORE (the SCORE-28) containing three factor scales that assess family strengths, difficulties and communication was identified through exploratory principal components analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the factor structure of the SCORE-28 was stable. The SCORE-28 and its 3 factor scales were shown to have excellent internal consistency reliability, satisfactory test-retest reliability, and construct validity. The SCORE-28 scales correlated highly with the General Functioning Scale of the Family Assessment Device, and moderately with the Global Assessment of Relational Functioning Scale, the Kansas Marital and Parenting Satisfaction Scales, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the Mental Health Inventory – 5, and the total problems scale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Correlational analyses also showed the SCORE-28 scales were not strongly associated with demographic characteristics or social desirability response set. The SCORE-28 may routinely be administered to literate family members over 12 years before and after family therapy to evaluate therapy outcome.Author has checked copyrightTS 19.04.1

Planning estimates for the mental health community support sector

Objective: To describe the approach undertaken to derive planning estimates for the mental health community support sector in Queensland, Australia