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The 2014/2015 UK requirement for involvement of service users and carers in training mental health professionals has prompted the authors to review the work of involvement in clinical psychology training in the university programme. Have the voices of service users and carers been heard? The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors update the paper of 2011 in which the authors described the challenges of inclusion and the specific approaches the authors take to involvement. The authors do this in the context of the recent change to UK standards for service user and carer involvement, and recent developments in relation to partnership working and co-production in mental healthcare. The authors describe the work carried out by the authors – members of a service user involvement group at a UK university – to ensure the voices of people affected by mental health difficulties are included in all aspects of training.

Careful work and the need for dedicated time is required to enable inclusive, effective and comprehensive participation in a mental health training programme. It is apparent that there is a group of service users whose voice is less heard: those who are training to be mental health workers.

For some people, involvement has increased. Trainee mental health professionals’ own experience of distress may need more recognition and valuing.

The authors are in a unique position to review a service-user-led project, which has run for 12 years, whose aim has been to embed involvement in training. The authors can identify both achievements and challenges.

Previous research suggests that service user and carer involvement (SUCI) in clinical psychology training may have an impact. The purpose of this study was to develop a validated questionnaire to enable trainee clinical psychologists to rate this.

A collaborative project was carried out with service users and carers and trainee clinical psychologists. The principles of questionnaire design were followed. The authors developed and validated a trainee self-report questionnaire, based on focus groups and relevant literature indicating potential impacts of involvement on practice. A draft 60-item version was piloted with 15 trainee clinical psychologists. Then, 133 trainees from 22 UK clinical psychology courses completed it (estimated response rate of 13.2%). The sample was representative of UK trainees in gender and ethnicity, but slightly older.

The principal component analysis produced a 36-item questionnaire with four factors: human communication, carer perspectives, empathy and challenging/changing. The questionnaire showed good internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Stakeholder consultation suggested face and content validity and there was some indication of construct validity.

The project has resulted in a usable co-produced questionnaire, which is now available to clinical psychology courses to assess the self-reported impact of SUCI in training, and which may also be used in future research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine service-users’ experiences of mentoring trainee clinical psychologists as part of an involvement initiative on a doctoral training course.

Seven service-users were paired with trainee clinical psychologists. Pairs met for one hour monthly over six months. Meetings were unstructured, lacked a formal agenda and were not evaluated academically. All seven mentors were interviewed. They were asked about positive and negative experiences, as well as about the support provided. Transcripts were subject to thematic analysis and themes were reviewed by mentors in a follow-up meeting.

Overall, the results demonstrate that service-users can be involved in training in a way that they find meaningful and contribute to their recovery. Seven themes were identified: giving hope and optimism; making a difference; personal and professional development; the process; practicalities/logistics; support (positives); and support (areas for improvement).

The importance of designing involvement initiatives in a way which implicitly supports service-user values was highlighted. Recommendations for designing effective support structures are given. The authors were also involved in the scheme which could have introduced bias.

The research exploring service-users’ experiences of involvement in training health professionals is limited. This was the first study to explore in depth service-users’ perspectives of involvement in a scheme such as the mentoring scheme. If initiatives are to seriously embrace the values of the service-user movement then seeking service-users’ perspectives is vital.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of service user involvement in mental health training but little is known about what staff, trainees and service users themselves want to achieve.

Three separate focus groups were held with service users, training staff and trainees associated with a clinical psychology training programme. Thematic analysis was used to identify aims for involvement.

All groups wanted to ensure that future professionals “remained human” in the way they relate to people who use services. Service user and carer involvement was seen as a way of achieving this and mitigating the problem of “them and us thinking”. The authors found that groups had some aims in common and others that were unique. Service users highlighted the aim of achieving equality with mental health professionals as an outcome of their involvement in teaching.

The samples were small and from one programme.

Common aims can be highlighted to foster collaborative working. However, the findings suggest that service users and carers, staff and trainees may also have different priorities for learning. These need to be recognised and addressed by mental health educators.

This was the first study to explore in depth the differing aims of different stakeholder groups for service user involvement. Clarification of aims is a vital first step in developing any future measure of the impact of service user involvement on mental health practice.

This paper aims to describe the challenges and rewards of service user and carer involvement in clinical psychology training as experienced in one training centre.

After outlining the major challenges of involvement in higher education and in clinical psychology training, the paper describes the work carried out by the authors. Members of the service user and carer advisory group Salomons Advisory Group of Experts by Experience (SAGE) recount their experiences of working with them in clinical psychology and Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) training. The challenges of inclusion and specific approaches that are used to work with these are explored.

Members of SAGE have experienced their contributions to the work in positive ways. However, inclusion in this context requires everyone involved to fully acknowledge the social and historical barriers in order to work together to overcome them.

Some of the approaches to meeting the challenges of inclusion in doctoral level clinical training may be applicable in other places.

In the authors' experience, true inclusion means openness to the authoritative voices of people not normally viewed as educators. A parallel question is the degree to which professionals feel safe to admit to service user experience or to draw upon other aspects of their personhood while working professionally. This may be crucial for successful partnership.

The authors are still on this journey of inclusion, and hope that by sharing some of their experiences of its complexities that they may help illuminate some elements of others' journeys.

This paper describes how service user involvement at all levels can offer a different route for the provision of good quality care for people experiencing mental distress. Taking examples of service user involvement in the acute solutions project (Sainsbury Centre for Mental Heath, 2006), the paper demonstrates how effective involvement can bring about measurable change in service provision and patient satisfaction. Examining the benefits, barriers to, and practicalities of service user involvement, it is argued that placing involvement at the centre offers solutions to the persistent problems found in mental health services. Workers who value and facilitate effective service user involvement enable social inclusion, change service users' status and enrich their own lives and practice.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interface between the professional and personal, and particularly personal realities reflected in the Equality Act (2010), within a clinical psychology training context.

An innovative action research process involving discussions, seminars and focus groups. The first author was a trainee on the programme and had been an informal carer. The other two authors are programme staff with service user experience. In the cycle presented here, six staff members and 14 trainees attended five 50‐minute reflective group sessions. Data were collected by focus group and analysed using thematic analysis.

Participants voiced continuing uncertainty about the personal‐professional interface alongside increased understanding of ways to enact it. Parenthood, class and mental health were identified as important domains and competition between these emerged as a theme.

The reflective groups and focus group have contributed to a process of change in relation to service user involvement and trainee learning. Transferability of the findings to other programmes is discussed and further research is required.

The authors would advocate for partnerships between trainees, staff and service users as a means of learning, researching and change within mental health training.

The authors are unaware of any other similar work: the unusual collaboration by the authors, the use of action research and the adoption of reflective groups within the process is unique.

The purpose of this paper is to build a theoretical model of how and what clinical psychologists learn from service user and carer involvement in their training.

A qualitative research design was adopted, and verbatim transcripts of semi-structured interviews conducted with 12 clinical psychologists were analysed using grounded theory methodology.

Findings indicated that clinical psychologists learned from service user and carer involvement in a variety of ways and a preliminary model was proposed, encompassing four main categories: “mechanisms of learning”, “relational and contextual factors facilitating learning”, “relational and contextual factors hindering learning” and “impact”.

Further research is required to establish to what extent the current findings may be transferrable to learning from service user and carer involvement in the context of educating professionals from other disciplines. Additionally, participants had limited experiences of carer involvement, and more research in this area specifically would be useful.

This study advocates for service user and carer involvement in clinical psychology training, and specific recommendations are discussed, including service user perspectives.

Service user and carer involvement has become mandatory in Health Care Professional Council-approved training programmes for mental health professionals, yet if and how learning occurs is poorly understood in this context. This study makes an important contribution in evaluating outcomes of service user and carer involvement in clinical psychology training by advancing theoretical understanding of the learning processes involved. The authors are unaware of similar work.

We witness rising tensions between online gig-economy platforms, incumbent firms, regulators, and labor unions. In this chapter, we use the framework of institutional logics as an analytical lens and scheme to understand the fundamental institutional challenges prompted by the advent of the online gig economy. We view gig-economy platforms as corporations that organize and self-regulate markets. In doing so, they span two parallel markets: the market for platforms competing to provide intermediation services and the market for the self-employed competing on platforms to provide peer-to-peer services. Self-regulation by platforms also weakens the traditional roles of the state. While the corporation and market logics empower the platform, they weaken self-employed suppliers as platforms’ design constrain suppliers to grow into a full-fledged business by limiting their entrepreneurial freedom. At the same time, current labor law generally does not classify suppliers as employees of the platform company, which limits the possibility to unionize. The current resolutions to this institutional misalignment are sought in “band aid solutions” at the level of sectors. Instead, as we argue, macro-institutional reform may be needed to re-institutionalize gig work into established institutional logics.