What kind of learning this international, multi perspective collaboration can produce? We asked it from intensive week participants and two main themes emerged: Understanding collaboration in its entirety and learning in personal level. You can also find the pictures from the first intensive week here.
Participants ideas highlight the importance of doing things together:
Understanding collaboration in its entirety
The importance of collaborative mental health services
- Every role is important in the services, including service user, family, and professionals.
- The holistic overview, diversity and mutual respect.
Collaboration between the countries
- Mental health care is organizes differently in every country. There are differences between countries and cultures and people, but more similarities.
- The idea of the collaborative work is different for every country.
- All the countries have issues in progress and example the role of family in recovery process can vary.
- Collaborative working with other countries has opened doors for future development in our own country.
Experts by experience have a big role in the mental health processes
- The new point of viewing mental health: patient as an individual.
- Recovery is always possible and it does not need to be imposed on the individual.
- The importance of including the family in the mental health care
Collaboration and learning
- For some countries student-teacher relationship is partnership and for some it is more hierarchical.
- There are many different ways to work in-group.
- Creating a safe environment makes it comfortable to communicate in. It is safe to be yourself.
- It has been good to see different teaching methods from different countries.
Barriers of collaboration
- Recognizing obstacles to implementing services such as collaboration whether they are political, social or economic.
Ideas for the future:
- After this week, we are very interested to see, how this project will turn out, will the materials that are going to be and do they reach enough people to have a difference.
- We need more particular expertise in these groups’ clinical, government and social work to share knowledge of collaborative working and how it can be implemented or helped to be implemented across services. Different opinions will help to consider what helps or hinders collaboration.
- Have to be realistic about crisis and shifting in healthcare.
- Difficult to look at the things that need improvement and how to improve them.
Learning in personal Level
We as students are more equipped in our knowledge and skills
- Personal development
- Learning to collaborate with other cultures
- Differences between expectations and reality (example language barrier wasn’t that big, it got easier during the week)
- Appreciation and respect for other cultures and dual cultures.
- Respecting on ourselves, and skills and our abilities and how others see us.
- You need to be ok with yourself first in order to give the best care to others
- We as students have learned a lot about ourselves and how our different characters can integrate within the collaborative mental healthcare team
Theoretical knowledge
- Clarity around Tokenism
- The concept of gamication (benefits and assessing its application within our clinical area)
Take a quick peek at our workshop activities.