Service user involvement in the assessment of a practice competency in mental health nursing - stakeholders' views and recommendations.

Competence in building therapeutic relationships is essential for student mental health nurses and therefore requires robust assessment. However, the assessment of such complex skills is problematic. Following policy directives exhorting increased service user involvement in general, there have been recent suggestions that service users could contribute to the assessment of practice. This paper outlines a research project which investigated the views of 24 stakeholders (service users, lecturers, mentors, ex-students and student nurses) about the potential involvement of service users in the assessment of student mental health nurses' competence in forming therapeutic relationships. The findings revealed that service users interviewed had a largely positive attitude towards this potential development. Nurse participants were more ambivalent. Despite citing several key advantages, nurses also expressed some important reservations about how such a proposal could be implemented in practice. Nevertheless, on balance, they were in favour in principle. Key recommendations for the implementation of this potential development included strategies to enable anonymity and freedom of choice for service users. A range of options for obtaining service user feedback were put forward, along with some ideas about how the fairness of the assessment might be protected.