The overall purpose of the Commune project is making mental health nursing education more relevant to the needs of modern mental health care by strengthen the focus on recovery from mental illnesses and involving mental health service user educators in the teaching of nursing students. To achieve this, the project will develop innovative internet based teaching material that will be co-produced by university teachers and service user educators. The teaching material, and the knowledge gained by its production, will improve the quality and relevance of higher education and help attune nursing education curricula to current and emerging labor markets needs. Six European universities, with associated partners –service users’ organizations— and one university from Australia, which is a world leading university in this field, will participate in the project. All partners have been designed responsibilities for different activities and outputs of the project with the University of Iceland managing it. All activities are aimed at producing the teaching material, implementing it, evaluating it, and secure its impact and transferability.The central output will be a Co-Produced Learning Module in Mental Health Recovery. It will be a blended learning module (1ECT) on mental health recovery, developed in a collaboration between service user educators and the academics partners. It will be delivered by service users –supported by the academic—to BS-nursing students. Delivery of the module will be supported by a detailed Implementation Guide that will sustain consistency of delivery across the participating universities. To secure impact and transferability of this output the Implementation Guide will be made available, in five different languages, in online version on the project’s website. So will information about the process of its making. An Outcome/Assessment Study will be conducted to asses and understand if and how the nursing student’s participation in the learning module will improve their recovery literacy, and change their attitudes to service user participation and to mental health nursing; and to explore the service user educators’ experience of teaching it. The findings of the study will be published in academic and professional journals, and in presentations at conferences. These publications will help nursing educators worldwide to assess the feasibility of adapting the project’s teaching material. Hence, it will ensure the impact and transferability of the project.A Best Practice Handbook will be produced that will offer nursing and service user educators guidance in how to implement and adjust the learning module to their needs. Also, it will provide higher educational institutions with recommendations and ways to involve service user educators in the teaching of mental health nursing. Hence it will be a key output to secure the project’s impact and transferability.The project will organize an international closing seminar, with the aim of increasing its transferability, where all significant project actors will be invited to share their experiences and outcomes of the project with an international audience. The project will make all necessary efforts to secure its quality. An international steering group with members from each partner organization will play a key role in that. The members of the steering group will be appointed by the universities’ authorities.
Service user involvement is an essential component for promoting recovery orientated mental health services and has been strongly advocated both by international medical institutions and service users’ organizations. Several universities in Europe have adopted this approach to nursing education and recruited service users to participate in mental health nursing education. One aim of this approach is to encourage students to adopt a recovery oriented approach, rather than an illness oriented approach to practice. This reflects the requirements of modern mental health services. Only the first steps have been taken in this direction and the universities participating in Commune project are at different levels in this development. Therefore our first objective was to co-produce teaching material in mental health nursing with equal contribution from service users’ educators and nurse academics. This coproduced approach to developing teaching materials has not, to our best knowledge, been tried before. To take the concept of co-production further, and train and empower the service users’ educators, they were responsible for the teaching of the teaching module that was co-produced. Throughout this process we aimed at giving the less experienced universities and service users educators an opportunity to learn from the more experienced ones. Furthermore, In Europe and Australia, there is a growing need for mental health care and hence increasing opportunity for nurses to pursue a career in mental health nursing. However mental health nursing is not a popular career choice. Therefore the second objective was to encourage nursing students to consider a career in mental health nursing by providing them with the opportunity to understand the experience of mental distress from the perspective of the service users. Seven Universities in five European countries and Australia took part in the project. These are all higher education institution at tertiary level. Collaborating organisations were the local mental health care users’ organisations in the home cities of the participating universities. The projects activities had three main components. (1) The development and the teaching of a co-produced learning module in mental health recovery. The module was taught by 18 service users to 825 BS-level nursing students in all participating universities. (2) The assessment/outcome of the teaching and other research activities. Qualitative research was undertaken to gain valuable service user perspectives as preparation of the development of the learning module. The impact of the module on both students and service users educators was evaluated using both quantitative and qualitative methods. (3) The development of a Best Practice Handbook that will offer mental health nursing academics and service user educators guidance in implementing the learning module or similar modules in the future. Teaching the learning module positively impacted both the nursing students and the Experts by Experience as the assessment studies have shown. The students became more exceptive of the social and institutional inclusion of people labelled with mental health illnesses and felt they were better prepared for a career in the mental health field (Happell, et al., 2018). The service users educators felt empowered by the teaching and better prepared for future teaching activities. Three papers that came out of the project have already been published, two are under review and more have been drafted. The project and its outcomes have been presented in numerous national and international conferences. Furthermore, the project has given the participants from different countries an opportunity to learn from each other. The participating universities and user movements are on different levels of service users educators involvement and the project gave the novices opportunity to learn from those more experienced. On the basis of our evaluations, observations and feedback, we strongly believe the project will have long-term benefits both locally and internationally. The positive findings will be used to encourage other universities to embed service users educators within their curricula, and will encourage the participating universities to strengthen their service users educators involvement. By conducting the project transnationally we hope to ensure that the teaching material and the experience of its development and implementation will have relevance beyond the countries involved and can be adapted to the needs of nursing educators in different countries. To achieve this a Best Practice Handbook which describes the process of the project and the learning module is available for all at the projects homepage: https://www.commune.hi.is