Developing and testing methods for improving patient-oriented mental health care

There is a trend in nursing policy and practice towards allowing patients to participate actively in their treatment and the services they use. The author concludes, based on an earlier qualitative study, that psychiatric patients in a hospital environment want a more active role in their treatment and that psychiatric nurses also aim at more active patient participation. In mental health care, professionals often define the needs of patients in terms of their own expertise and tend to overlook the variety of the service users' needs. The need to improve and empower psychiatric patients is a considerable challenge to present-day nursing. The purpose of this paper is to describe the theoretical background of tools used to assess patients' involvement in mental health care and the process by which credibility can be determined in rating the panel phase of instrument construction. The instruments, based on a qualitative study using grounded theory, produced a model of patient initiatives in psychiatric nursing. Content validity refers to the determination of the substantive representativeness or relevance of the items of an instrument. Face validity has been defined as validity conferred by a lay persons' acceptance that a procedure, statement or instrument appears to be sound or relevant. In the panel rating, the raters were experts. They evaluated the readability, consistency and content validity of the instruments' items. In the instrument for nurses, the content validity was 0.84 and consistency 0.91; this corresponds to 0.91 and 0.95, respectively, in the instrument for patients.