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Nursing students must be prepared to provide nursing care regardless of the patient's illness. This requires that nursing education, including clinical placements, strengthen knowledge and skills in mental health nursing. The aim of this qualitative study was to describe 15 preceptors' expectations of nursing students' preparedness before they entered the psychiatric field. Data was collected with focus group interviews and analysed using conventional content analysis. The findings show that preceptors are concerned about the nursing students' will and ability to reflect on and exercise knowledge for managing the student role and themselves; for adapting their perspective on humanity; for their understanding of illness and how they are interacting with persons with mental illness. The conclusion is that the preceptors expect the educators to give sufficient theoretical knowledge and assess the students' personal maturity prior to entering the psychiatric field.

Background: In Norway, due to demographic challenges with an ageing population and lower fertility rates, current government policies have encouraged municipalities and volunteers to collaborate. Moreover, present policies recommend an increase in volunteer activities within care services. Co-production is advocated as a functional and innovative method of activating resources when citizens and public employees interact in the care sector. Method: This study has scrutinised ongoing volunteer activities in nursing homes and home care facilities by utilising the results from a survey targeting employees in public care services. Aim: The aim has been to identify the extent to which long-term care units (LTC units) in Norwegian municipalities and voluntary organisations collaborate in the coordination of volunteer activities at the local level by answering the following research questions: when LTC units and voluntary organisations collaborate in coordinating voluntary activities within caring services: are they sharing tasks, dividing the tasks between them or both? Findings: The results show that LTC units often coordinate volunteer activities that correspond to statutory public care services. Additionally, LTC units also contribute considerably in coordinating other volunteer activities, either alone or to a small extent in collaboration with voluntary organisations. This limited task sharing when coordinating volunteer activities in municipal care services can be seen as a suboptimal way of using the resources. Hence, a large part of this paper concerns a discussion of the theory of co-production in public care services, drawing on the findings of the survey.

Although volunteers already contribute, more volunteers are wanted in the Norwegian care services. The authorities propose that new ways of interacting between public services and volunteers can produce innovation. Researchers within public innovation describe collaborative innovation as a strategy that includes different actors. The study thus seeks to answer the potential for collaborative innovation as a strategy for increased voluntary efforts in municipal care services. This will be further scrutinised by looking at who is involved in voluntary work today and who is not. By using data from a population survey of 4000 respondents, the article presents an overview of voluntary activity in Norway, emphasising the care sector. The study shows that the potential for collaborative innovation is present; however, facing the different actors, collaborative innovation as a strategy is deficient when representing an organisational level. Thus, the largest contributor in the current collaboration is excluded, since the informal caregivers are individuals operating independently of a group or organisation. Concerning future collaboration between various actors in the care services, it is important to realise that the largest resource is unorganised, hence informal structures must meet on informal premises, simply because they are volunteers.