Teaching resources

Service users and carers sometimes bring a challenging perspective to the classroom, offering psychosocial rather than medical interpretations, highlighting the harm that health services can do and drawing attention to failings in care. Such contributions need to be carefully crafted to stimulate, rather than crush, students' motivation to become competent and compassionate nurses. When academic staff are involved in co-facilitating learning, they sometimes help by monitoring this issue and offering balance where it is required.

Reasons for and against live presentations in comparison with recorded media are set out here. A complete diet of online materials may be appropriate for an online course of study, but where academic staff appear 'in the flesh' in front of students, it is reasonable to expect the same principle will apply to service users and carers.

Re-usable learning objects

• See Health Education England's introduction to involving service users and carers in nurse education here
• "Our Child" developed by the Down's Heart group.
• "Baby First"
• "Hello, my name is Tom." Tom has Autistic Spectrum disorder (ASD). This RLO won the 2009 Fiona Law prize for student-led innovation awarded by the National Network of Learning DisabilityNursing
• "Little things make a big difference" Communication between a person with learning disabilities and a health professional.
• "My house, my rights". Health care staff disregard the rights of people with learning disabilities in their home.
• "Expressing sexuality".
• "Patient Voices."
• "Involving Service Users and Carers in your teaching"

Websites that offer patient stories

• Patient Opinion - 170,000 stories that altogether have been viewed over 83 million times - 100,000 visits a week.
• Patient Stories
• Patient Voices
• Patient Commando
• The history of learning disability services
• Animated accounts of mental health experiences
• Healthtalk Online
• NHS Patient Story telling
• Patients like me
• The Royal College of Psychiatrists has produced some podcasts by service users and carers here.
• A whole collection of films about mental health from a user perspective is available at CEIMH
• Hello Grief
• Mental health recovery stories from Worcestershire.
• A variety of video stories from Bournemouth University
• The Cultivating Compassion website offers a range of resources, including digital stories on how to create and sustain a compassionate workforce.
• Thinksafe has created some sketches that 'are deliberately surreal and somewhat subversive to provoke reflection but they are based on real patient and staff experience'.

A bibliography of first-person accounts of madness. See also the I Am Whole collection of stories written by people living with mental health issues.

Digital stories

• 'Sunday Lunch' by Sam Samociuk
• 'Evolution of a Mother' by Joan Tate
• 'Meet my Son' by Naseem Akram
• 'Caring is all About Love' by Kausar Iqbal
• 'My Family Doctor Has Disappeared' by Chris Essen
• 'Mum and Macular' by Sue Fallon

Twitter

• At the University of Greenwich, students are encouraged to follow user-led organisations or key individuals who bring a service user or carer perspective.

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