© 2004 The Royal College of Psychiatrists
User and carer involvement in mental health training
Gill Livingston is a reader in the psychiatry of old age at Royal Free and University College Medical School (Holborn Union Building, Archway Campus, Highgate Hill, London N19 5NL, UK. Tel: 020 7530 2309; fax: 020 7530 2304; e-mail: g.livingston{at}ucl.ac.uk) and an honorary consultant in the mental health care of older people with Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust. Her research interests include the epidemiology of psychiatric illness in older people and the mental health of carers. Claudia Cooper is a specialist registrar with Camden and Islington Mental Health Trust currently undertaking dual training in old age and general adult psychiatry. Her research interests are the mental health of ethnic elders and concordance therapy.
National policy in the UK emphasises the importance of involving service users and caregivers in all types of mental health provision. The training of mental health care and social service professionals has always relied on seeing patients, but the patients’ role has usually been a passive one. This is now changing, and service users and carers are becoming active educators in professional training, benefiting both the teachers and those taught. Provision is still very variable and is dependent on local initiatives. Voluntary organisations are active in this field, and there are now two academic posts for service users in the UK. This article explores the current forms of service user training, its benefits and drawbacks, and makes recommendations for future work.
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