Community Mental Health Knowledge Exchange

Associated Projects and Organisations

What is Partners?

The Partners research study was designed collaboratively with people with lived experience of psychosis and bipolar disorder and worked with nearly 200 participants over a 2 year period. Care Partners were employed in the study to work with people with these complex mental health difficulties to promote engagement with other services and to increase wellbeing by using a goals based, person centred coaching approach.

Working in Community Mental Health Systems Supporting People With Severe Mental Illness Briefing Paper

Why is the Partners study important?

Many people with long term mental health difficulties such as psychosis and bipolar disorder have a reduced life expectancy of up to 20 years in comparison the general population and suffer from many physical health conditions that contribute to that lower life expectancy. The need for these people to engage in physical health care checks is paramount and the partners study was designed to help engagement in this process. Also, it has been delivered by VCSE practitioners to help those in mental health services promote more effective engagement in the community particularly amongst those where motivation and self agency is a challenge.

What are the key components of Partners?

Developing a collaborative(shared) biopsychosocial understanding of a person needs and desires is important and promotes a congruent, trusting relationship with the care partner involved in coaching the service user towards reaching their goals. Care partners act as professional friends who spend time and are interested in understanding what is happening to the service user from all aspects of their life which increases effective engagement and promotes better outcomes for the service user alongside the practitioner. The flexibility to engage with the service users and work with their expectations seems to be a key ingredient in promoting change and engagement amongst service users who have historically tended to live quite impoverished lives often receiving little ongoing support from mental health services.

How to implement Partners locally

The third phase of partners was to conduct a study which explored the implementation challenges involved in delivering the partners approach in community mental health services. Care partners chosen from local mental health services included practitioners from community mental health teams and VCSE practitioners. Training in the Partners model was offered by the research team to local supervisors and those who were intending to be care partners. The research team continued to engage with services by working with system leaders in the organisation who were responsible for service delivery and decision making and meta supervision was offered to supervisors to help consolidate delivery.

Figure 4 is taken from the Working in Community Mental Health Systems Supporting People With Severe Mental Illness Briefing Paper

Learning from Partners3

The challenges of implementing a different way of working was at times difficult in the context of transforming services. Practitioners embraced the partners approach often finding it a positive mechanism to engage with service users. The challenges of implementation often arose as a result of the system as a whole being unsure where Partners fitted during a transforming mental health system. The Partners 3 study found that system leaders were essential to support the implementation of Partners3 and where this leadership was absent, effective delivery was hindered. Also supervision was key to consolidating the work of the care partners.

Important observations

The kind of relationship and support that is valued by service users is one which takes the form of a professional friend, which incorporates a collaborative relationship based on trust and understanding which allows time for this to develop and promotes choice.

For practitioners, the importance of supervision is paramount to help practitioners unlearn previous practice and learn new ways of working. Practitioners need to be identified with the personal skills to build those collaborative relationships required in the context of a team culture that promotes working in a collaborative way.

For further more detailed information please visit the McPin website and if you have an interest in learning more about Partners and how it might work in your organisation contact cmhke@plymouth.ac.uk