Improving partnerships with families and carers in in‐patient mental health services for older people: a staff training programme and family liaison service

In spite of policies advocating the involvement of families in the care of mental health service users in the UK, there are few examples of initiatives to develop staff confidence and skills in partnership working. This article describes a whole team training initiative and family liaison service to promote family inclusive working on in‐patient wards for older people in Somerset, UK. A three‐day staff‐training programme is described and training outcomes are reported. Staff report a substantial increase in confidence and family meetings held. A pre‐and post‐ training case note audit shows increased consideration of the needs of families. To further increase face to face meetings with families a family liaison service has been established, whereby a staff member with systemic family therapy training joins ward staff to hold family meetings as part of the assessment/admission process. Evaluation of this service has shown it to be effective with positive feedback from families and staff.     

Move evaluationasa predictor and moderator of success in solutions to well-structured problems

This paper presents three studies concerned with the evaluation of moves in solutions to Tower of Hanoi problems and the effect that such evaluation processes have on solution success. The existing literature on problem solving suggests that verbalizing whilst solving a problemcan havea positive effect upon performance. However,such verbalization has to be directed toward an explicit evaluation of particular moves. What remains unclear is whether evaluation without verbalization has the same effects or whether some characteristic of the process of verbalization gives rise to improved performance on such tasks. For example, the act of verbalizing per se may simply mean that more processing time is directed toward the problem-solving process. The studies reported in this paper suggest that the process of evaluation may be independent of verbalization processes and that non-verbal evaluation of moves (indicated by a key press) produces the same effects as a verbal evaluation of such moves. Moreover, the process of evaluating moves appears to producea form of behaviour that is prone to disruption via the administration of secondary tasks, whereas non-evaluated solutions are not. This may suggest that problem solvers who engage in evaluation processes develop an explicit representation of the strategies used to solve the problem.