ABSTRACT
It is important for learners and healthcare practitioners to develop an awareness and understanding of the lived experiences of those they are engaged with in practice. This helps promote empathic, sensitive and caring approaches to care as strongly advocated by a number of key sources including the Francis Inquiry Report (The Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Inquiry, 2013), the 5-Year Mental Health plan (DoH, 2014) and the National Dementia Strategy (DoH, 2009). Learning about lived experience and accessing narrative accounts can be facilitated through various means involving service user engagement in practice and educational environments or exposure to selected media products. This provides opportunities to ‘tune in’ to personal accounts of living with varied mental health states. The first part of this chapter looks at the historical journey tracing the emergence of the service user as a key factor within healthcare education. The second part is concerned with the personal experience of one’s involvement with learning. This is based around a series of interviews and questionnaires by the author which elicited personal reflections around one’s involvement. Selected narrative responses representing individuals’ views are italicised and included after each question. This is complemented by a review of the effectiveness of this involvement from a learning point of view with related literature accessed.
