Expected Beneficial Outcomes of Service Users and Carers’ Involvement in Health and Social Care Education

Opeyemi Odejimi

Department of Psychiatric Liaison, Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust, Birmingham, United Kingdom

Dr. Opeyemi Odejimi, Department of Psychiatric Liaison, Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust, Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Keywords: Service Users and Carers’ Involvement; Health and Social Care Education; Main Stakeholders; Beneficial Outcomes; Students; Academic Staff; Service Users and Carers

Abstract

In the United Kingdom, of the involvement of individuals or patients with long term disease conditions (commonly referred to as services user) together with their families or friends (also referred to as carers) commonly referred to as Service Users and Carers Involvement has become a necessity in many health and social care education programmes. There are limited studies that have evaluated its impact in students’ education. This paper discusses the expected beneficial outcomes of involving service users and carers’ in health and social care pre-registration degrees. In particular, it will focus on the expected beneficial outcomes to the three main stakeholders in higher education which are: service users and carers, students, and academic staff. This paper was developed from a conference discussion. Eight main beneficial outcomes to the three main stakeholders were identified, of which three were similar to both staff and students. This paper shares these findings and considers it as a potential benchmark for future exploration of the impacts of involvement in health and social care pre-registration degrees to the three main stakeholders.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).