Development and validation of the mental health professional culture inventory

Abstract

Aims No instrument has been developed to explicitly assess the professional culture of mental health workers interacting with severely mentally ill people in publicly or privately run mental health care services. Because of theoretical and methodological concerns, we designed a self-administered questionnaire to assess the professional culture of mental health services workers. The study aims to validate this tool, named the Mental Health Professional Culture Inventory (MHPCI). The MHPCI adopts the notion of ‘professional culture’ as a hybrid construct between the individual and the organisational level that could be directly associated with the professional practices of mental health workers. Methods The MHPCI takes into consideration a multidimensional definition of professional culture and a discrete number of psychometrically derived dimensions related to meaningful professional behaviour. The questionnaire was created and developed by a conjoint Italian-Canadian research team with the purpose of obtaining a fully cross-cultural questionnaire and was pretested in a pilot study. Subsequently, a validation survey was conducted in northern Italy and in Canada (Montreal area, Quebec). Data analysis was conducted in different steps designed to maximise the cross-cultural adaptation of the questionnaire through a recursive procedure consisting of performing a principal component analysis (PCA) on the Italian sample (N = 221) and then testing the resulting factorial model on the Canadian sample (N = 237). Reliability was also assessed with a test-retest design. Results Four dimensions emerged in the PCA and were verified in the confirmatory factor analysis: family involvement, users' sexuality, therapeutic framework and management of aggression risk. All the scales displayed good internal consistency and reliability. Conclusions This study suggests the MHPCI could be a valid and reliable instrument to measure the professional behaviour of mental health services workers. The content of the four scales is consistent with the literature on psychosocial rehabilitation, suggesting that the instrument could be used to evaluate staff behaviour regarding four crucial dimensions of mental health care.

The Early Impact of the Covid-19 Emergency on Mental Health Workers: A Survey in Lombardy, Italy

“…This is due to the snowball convenience sampling strategy. The study sample has a larger percentage of psychologists and peer support workers compared to a previous survey that collected data directly from mental health teams from public and nonprofit services [ 11 ]. The number of peer support workers in the current sample is over-representative, and this is probably a consequence of a sampling bias caused by the involvement of a peer support association (a factor that we could evaluate positively as an index of service users’ involvement in research), while the relatively large number of psychologists compared to 2015 is a consequence of the investigators’ choice to include freelance professionals that work in private practice in the 2020 survey.…”

“…Two strategies were adopted to increase the validity of the sampling method: during the first week of data collection, investigators sent the survey invitation to directors and service coordinators of public, nonprofit or private services with a request for them to spread it to the multi-professional teams that they supervised. Then, after the first week of data collection, the current preliminary sample was compared with the final sample from a similar survey of mental health workers conducted in 2015 [ 11 ], and the investigators tried to correct and compensate for over- and under-represented professional categories by sending targeted invitations to members of specific professional groups (i.e., nurses).…”

“…The survey was made up of four sections. Section 1 included questions, partially retrieved from a previous survey [ 11 ], aimed at gathering socio-demographic and professional background information. Section 2 and Section 3 were composed of ad hoc questions designed to collect information about work conditions during the emergency (i.e., changes in workload, experience of Covid-19 infection among users and colleagues, perceived probability of infection at work and concerns) and the provision of interventions.…”

Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic in Public Mental Health: An Extensive Narrative Review

“…This is how primary care in face-to-face or remote mental health must arrive to stay, adapting existing means to continue services, facilitating access to mental health care, as well as the continuation of pre-existing treatments, to avoid referrals for treatment continuity gaps and as one of the main strategies of health services. In addition, special attention must be paid to mental health professionals, since the first wave of COVID-19 showed a high degree of burnout in this collective [105][106][107][108].…”

A critical discourse analysis of the link between professional culture and organisational culture

“…Professional culture not only dictates tasks and social norms at work, it also defines the entire work environment, including what makes sense (in terms of behaviours) and the necessary procedures among a professional group (Rapisarda et al, 2020;Janus and Browning, 2014). It has a substantive inertia, and change requires time and a sequence of interventions (Helmreich and Merritt, 1998).…”