Helping Professionals Learn from Carers

Helping Professionals Learn from Carers is our working group which plans and delivers the involvement of carers in all aspects of the way mental health professionals are educated, both before and after qualifying. This takes place, primarily, in the various universities and colleges around the West Midlands region.

The group continues to thrive and its 10 members work hard to facilitate carer involvement on the courses they have agreed to support. In all, we have identified 8 nursing courses in the region, 7 social work courses, 2 centres for the training of psychiatrists and 1 interdisciplinary mental health postgraduate course. There is active carer involvement in over 50% of these courses but there is still much work to be done in developing this initiative further and making the carer involvement more influential.

A set of guidance papers have been produced by the group to help carers who are involved in the training of professionals and these are as follows:
Guidance Note 1
Common messages for Carers involved in training mental health staff
Guidance Note 2
Practical Presentation Skills
Guidance Note 3
For Carers to present to Tutors when asked to present a carer perspective to their course

Members of the group were also instrumental in producing a DVD on Carers
Assessments in conjunction with the Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Mental Health at Birmingham University. This can be accessed on their web site
A DVD produced by CSIP - ‘What it means to make a difference’ (Caring for people with mental illness who use alcohol and drugs) - also features carers from Carers in Partnership and it should be possible to get a copy of this DVD with booklet if you contact us.

A group of carer members of Carers in Partnership were recently invited to talk to undergraduates on the social work degree course at the University of Wolverhampton - Telford campus.  The 7 carers who undertook this project felt that the University handled the exercise really well and so one of them has summarised the  learning points which other academic establishments engaging with carers may find helpful

The group would be interested to hear from carers who are already involved regularly in the training of professionals and from carers who would like to be more actively involved. Please contact us.