Satisfaction with mental health services. A user participation approach

User participation in the delivery and evaluation of mental health services has become an important policy element in the development of these services. An important area where user involvement could be especially useful concerns satisfaction with care, which has become considered an important indicator of service excellence. The overall aim of this study was to investigate user satisfaction with mental health services in a county in southern Sweden. The study design used persons with own experience from being a patient or a close relative to a patient as active participants in the data collection. A group of 20 persons with experience from being users or relatives to users were recruited and trained to be interviewers in the study. Together they performed 227 interviews focusing user satisfaction regarding both inpatient and outpatient care. The interview had one quantitative part and one qualitative part. The interviewers' experiences from participation in the project were evaluated through focus groups. In these groups, the topics were the interviewers' impression of the content of their interviews and their experience from being an interviewer. The analysis showed a high satisfaction with care in the quantitative part. In the qualitative part a significant dissatisfaction with many aspects of the care were expressed. The focus group evaluation largely supported the findings from the analyses of the dataset. Experiences of being user and interviewer were generally positive and perceived as rewarding.