Mental Health Substance Use Interview Guide - Discovery

I did my placement as part of the Mental Health and Substance Use (MHSU) Pathfinder programme within the Government and NHS improvement agency Healthcare Improvement Scotland.

There are clear links between poor mental health and substance use yet people with these support needs often have a difficult experience accessing appropriate support as there's a lack of joined-up system pathways. The programme is working to redesign these pathways, so those accessing care for one issue will be treated for both at the point of contact.

In order to redesign the pathways, service users are interviewed to find out what the current system looks like. To speed up the process, staff within third sector organisations are being commissioned to conduct these interviews. Over 12 weeks my research found that the current discussion guide and inexperience of the staff wasn't bringing out sufficient usable insights, so I worked to make an interview pack that guided the interviewers through the process. The guide provides context by containing information on the programme and explains why users are being interviewed, has a discussion guide tailored to pull relevant data and and provides ethical guidelines and tips on trauma informed practice.

Guide contents:

Programme background
Why we are including service users in our research
An explainer on qualitative data
Trauma informed interviewing
Interview guide
Tips for the note taker
Discussion plan with improved questions
Hot Report for quick data grouping and analysis
Tips for synthesising the qualitative data in which I've made an example