Search results for "Service user"
showing 8 items of 18 documents
Citizen experts in participatory governance: Democratic and epistemic assets of service user involvement, local knowledge and citizen science
2021
Initiatives that attribute expert status to ‘ordinary citizens’ proliferate in a range of societal realms and are generally celebrated for ‘democratising expertise’. By tapping new sources of knowledge and participation simultaneously, such ‘citizen expertise’ practices seem to provide responses to the contemporary decline of trust in political elites and traditional experts that seriously challenges the legitimacy of democratic policy-making. This study distinguishes between three quintessential types of citizen expertise (‘local knowledge’, ‘service user involvement’ and ‘citizen science’) and, from an integrated perspective, critically discusses the value of citizen expertise for public…
Professionals’ views on children’s service user involvement
2021
Purpose Children are gradually attaining recognition as service users and their involvement in service development has been advanced in recent years. This study draws on empirical research in social and health-care services designed for children and families. The purpose of this paper is to analyse how professionals understand children’s involvement as experts by experience. The focus is on professionals’ views and intergenerational relations. Design/methodology/approach The research data comprise 25 individual and 10 group interviews with managers and professionals working in social and health-care services in one Finnish province. The data were analysed using qualitative thematic analysi…
Making experts-by-experience : governmental ethnography of participatory initiatives in Finnish social welfare organisations
2018
This dissertation analyses expertise-by-experience in Finnish social welfare organisations as part of the participatory practices presented as new democracy. It employs a governmental ethnographic method to investigate how a person with difficult experiences is made into ‘an expert of one’s own life’ and how the subjectivity thus created is connected to different possibilities and rationales of participation. It asks: 1. What characterises the subjectivities created in the initiatives? 2. How (through which practices) are the participants constructed as experts? In this summary article the democratic quality of expert-making practices is interpreted through a critical democratic lens by inq…
Renta de emergencia familiar en Gandia
2011
Sensible ante la situación económica y de nuevas necesidades emergentes, el Ayuntamiento de Gandia, como principal promotor de políticas sociales, considera necesario integrar dentro de sus iniciativas para promover la igualdad, la solidaridad y la mejora de la calidad de vida, un recurso económico para paliar las distintas situaciones en las que se encuentran familias sin ingresos debido a que los adultos integrantes de la unidad familiar se encuentran en situación de desempleo. Se impulsa, como respuesta a estas nuevas necesidades, una prestación de carácter periódico denominada Renta de Emergencia Familiar (REF) que viene acompañada de un conjunto de actuaciones de carácter municipal dir…
Achieving agreement on service needs in child protection : Comparing children’s, mothers’ and practitioners’ views over time and between approaches
2022
Purpose While studies on service users’ participation and their perceptions on the quality of services exist, agreement between family members’ and practitioners’ assessments of the family’s situation has received less interest. The purpose of this paper is to investigate agreement and its effect on outcomes by comparing the viewpoints of three groups of informants (children, mothers and practitioners) in the context of statutory child protection in two study groups – one applying a systemic approach (SPM) and a service-as-usual control group (SAU). Design/methodology/approach A quasi-experimental repeated-measures study design was applied. Outcome data comprised 112 cases (SPM cases n = 5…
Protocol for a participatory survey to investigate the long-term effectiveness of adult psychiatric services (PSILEAPS) : a prospective exploratory c…
2022
Mental health research and practice is currently moving beyond a focus on group-level symptom reduction models. Hence, research and treatment increasingly emphasize the real-life individual needs of service users and their social networks. One example is the Open Dialogue approach (OD), which has demonstrated promising outcomes in the Finnish Western Lapland (WL) catchment area. Nevertheless, it is unclear how OD-based services have so far been maintained in WL. It is also unclear how the experiences of multi-disciplinary care teams, service users and their social network members differ, with regard to differing approaches to mental health treatment. More generally, there is a global need f…
Turning experience into expertise : technologies of the self in Finnish participatory social policy
2017
This article investigates the micro-level practices of subject-construction in Finnish participatory social policy. Through a governmental ethnography on projects that invite former beneficiaries to become ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organizations, I discern the possibilities for freedom in the participants’ self-construction. By making use of Michel Foucault’s conceptual tools of care of the self and confession, I illustrate how, contrary to the projects’ emancipatory promise of providing the service users the freedom to reconstruct themselves, the projects entail practices that curb the participants’ way of ‘knowing themselves’. They require the service users to reframe thei…
How do health care services help and hinder recovery after a suicide attempt? A qualitative analysis of Finnish service user perspectives
2022
Background Suicide attempt survivors are at high risk of re-attempts and suicide death. Previous research has shown that service users’ experiences of post-attempt care are related to future treatment engagement and re-attempts. In-depth understanding of how current services meet service users’ needs in the period immediately following a suicide attempt is thus imperative for the development of more effective tertiary prevention practices in real-life health care systems. Method In this qualitative study, Finnish suicide attempt survivors’ experiences of and perspectives on mental health services were explored through a semi-structured interview. Participants were seven female and seven mal…