ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that key elements of service users', staff members' and carers' experience in inpatient services, evoke strong and universal feelings, including terror, shame and alienation. Experience-based co-design (EBCD) is one such way of working collaboratively to improve health care services. EBCD enables service users, carers and staff to work together to improve services and health care environments. EBCD is a collaborative approach, and mental health inpatient wards are difficult environments for the development of trust between staff, service users and carers. In considering inpatient spaces, the reverse needs to happen; consideration of the environment needs to extend to thinking about the people who occupy these spaces, and how they interact. In mental health services, and particularly in inpatient care, trust can be threatened by the dual role of the service provider, as both coercive and caring. Mental health contexts are different to physical health ones. Using EBCD in mental health services requires additional thought.
