Enhancing the therapeutic interaction skills of staff working in acute adult inpatient psychiatric wards: Outcomes of a brief intervention education programme
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and objective: Clinical practice in acute inpatient environments is complex and demanding for clinical staff. To facilitate service user recovery, it is essential that personnel working in these environments are competent and confident in a range of therapeutic interaction skills, which can have impact in a brief period. This paper describes an exploratory study which determined the outcomes of a brief therapeutic engagement education and training short course for staff working in adult inpatient acute wards. As far as we know this was the first time, based on evidence from earlier research involving service users that Heron’s Six Category Intervention Analysis and solution focused brief therapy (SFBT) have been combined in an education and training short course that was coproduced and delivered in partnership with service users for staff working in acute environments.Methods: The short course explored the myriad applications of the six categories of intervention initially proposed by Heron and the widespread applicability of SFBT. The programme evaluation adopted focus group methodology and examined: (1) how useful the training content was to daily practice and how relevant the skills learn were to interactions with service user residing on the ward; (2) the factors than helped enable the transference of the learning to the ward environment as well as any barriers; (3) personal learning; and (4) strengths of the learning experience and suggestions for improvement to the training and learning experience.Results: Feedback from participants reflected a high degree of skill and knowledge acquisition and enhancement. Staff found the content of the training useful and helpful to their daily practice as it aided in increasing confidence, therapeutic interventions and care-planning. Skills learnt by the trainees were considered relevant to interactions with service users residing on the ward. Factors that helped to enable encounters with service users, as well as the barriers, when transferring the learning to the ward environment were discussed and included managerial support, demand for beds, time, opportunity and staffing shortages. Regarding personal learning, staff reported feeling more able to connect with service users when employing SFBT techniques and Heron’s intervention approaches and felt that the training validated their current working practice.Conclusions: The SFBT training appears to have provided an interactional communication toolkit for healthcare professionals and could be further embraced given the right circumstances e.g. managerial support and attitude change of nursing staff in general. Further research is needed to gain an understanding of the effect of short and concentrated education and training programmes aimed at staff members working within adult acute inpatient mental healthcare settings, as well as measuring whether the activity, i.e. healthcare professional–service user interactions, is meaningful to service user outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".