The Thorn Initiative is a prominent education and training programme for psychosocial interventions. The course originated in two centres in the UK in 1992, 10 years on the programme had expanded to 13 centres across England and Wales. A survey of course content and structure was sent out to all 13 sites by email of which eight responded by post. The survey results showed that since 1999 there has been a rapid growth in the number of Thorn sites. There remains a high degree of fidelity to the original courses in mode of delivery, service user and carer participation, and core content. All of the sites were progressing towards providing degree courses, usually in a modular format and with an expanded curriculum. In conclusion, the Thorn Steering Group has been successful in Thorn site expansion and curriculum development. Such success has taken activity away from audit and research in psychosocial interventions, education, training, implementation and fidelity to taught skills. Implementation remains a cause for concern and it is recommended that a focus for Thorn sites should be on creating and evaluating novel solutions to this pervasive problem.

Care pathways are used extensively in inpatient medical and surgical services to facilitate the delivery of evidence-based health care. There is a growing interest in their use in the mental health arena. However, questions remain about their acceptability to service users and staff. Most current literature is aimed at communicating the value of care pathways. Consequently, issues that are particularly pertinent to mental health, like language, therapeutic relationships and individualized care have not been fully addressed. This paper reports on the development of a care pathway in residential services in Nottingham. It will illustrate how by working in multidisciplinary groups with service users and carers these issues were incorporated into a comprehensive pathway that follows the service user's journey from admission to discharge. The paper concludes by highlighting some of the challenges of care pathway implementation and suggests ways they can be overcome.

This paper describes how psychosocial interventions (PSI) have been integrated into an undergraduate mental health nursing programme. The first part of the paper provides the broad context of PSI in nurse education and justifies the need to incorporate skills for PSI into the undergraduate nursing curriculum. A variety of educational theories and research are presented, which have informed the development, structure and delivery of the skills programme underpinned by PSI into the undergraduate programme. The successes and limitations of this skills programme are considered in light of the key issues and challenges concerning the integration of PSI skills into undergraduate nursing education.

No abstract

No abstract