Collaboration, coproduction and leadership: A decade of service user involvement in mental health research at St George’s
2014 Conference
Abstract:
Collaboration
Now in our tenth year, service user involvement in mental health research at St George’s has always asked ‘what difference does it make?’ Our ‘detained patients’ work demonstrated that collaborative research has an important, measurable impact on how research is analysed and interpreted. We have produced guidelines for collaborative research – ‘Balancing Good Research with Good Mental Health’ – recently updated with the Mental Health Research Network’s support.
Coproduction
The way mental health research is conventionally done has been challenged and changed by strong service user voices on our research teams. We called this approach coproduction and described it in our award winning ‘Staying Native’ paper. Our first national study – the Self-Care project – resulted in a model of coproduction in mental health research.
Coproduction for us is also about looking critically at how academic and clinical researchers do research. Our personality disorders and recovery research used this approach to bridge perspectives and communicate to both service users and clinicians.
Leadership
Our team of experienced, skilled service user researchers provides leadership to the PEER service user research group – now developing its own user-led research – and plays a leading role in supporting research involvement strategy in the local Trust. In our latest national research project – the Peer Worker project – one of the team led a study-within-a-study, observing and interviewing the research process to test our coproduction approach. And another team member recently secured the UK’s first ever user-led National Institute for Health Research Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
Authors
Gibson ~ Sarah
Sarah Gibson has worked as a service user researcher for much of the past ten years and at St George's University of London since 2010, most recently on the Peer Worker research project. She has extensive experience of supporting and leading service user research teams and of developing guidelines for service user involvement in research.
View all articles by this authorGillard ~ Steve
Steve Gillard is Reader in Social and Community Mental Health at St George’s, University of London. He has been supporting and evaluating service user involvement in mental health research for 12 years. He has worked with service user researcher colleagues at St George's to develop a 'coproduction' approach to research, used in a number of studies about self-care, recovery and peer support in mental health.
View all articles by this authorSweeney ~ Angela
National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Postdoctorial Research Fellow in Survivor Lead Research, St George's University of London. Angela Sweeney is a mental health survivor researcher. Her research interests include survivors’ perspectives on and experiences of services and treatments, and alternatives to psychiatry. She is lead editor of This is Survivor Research (2009) and has a PhD from the Institute of Psychiatry.
View all articles by this authorTurner ~ Kati
Service User Researcher, St George’s University of London. Kati Turner has worked as a service user researcher at St George’s, University of London, since 2005. She has been involved in a variety of research projects and has a particular interest in service user involvement and collaborative partnerships and the impact of these on the research process and findings.
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