Creating employment opportunities for people with mental health problems: A feasibility study for new initiatives

This paper describes a feasibility study for the development of a network of employment services for people with mental health problems (and other) who are unemployed. It highlights the problems of using debate-oriented, soft Operational Research OR methods when there are difficulties of open communication between different interest groups. In this case, the interest groups were clients and professionals in the mental health system. To bypass these difficulties, a series of confidential interviews was conducted with stakeholders. The issue of who was to be interviewed was resolved through a rolling programme of recommendations, where each interviewee recommended others until most of the people being recommended were people who had already been seen. This approach allowed for the involvement of many people and agencies who the researchers did not initially suspect might be stakeholders. Having conducted the interviews, the researchers then produced a design in the form of an ‘expert’ report. Although they had serious reservations about taking such an approach instead of simply supporting the expertise of already identified stakeholders, it turned out, upon reflection, that they had made the right decision. The ‘expert’ approach allowed the views of service users to be taken into account. Also, the rolling programme of recommendations used to determine who should be interviewed actually uncovered hitherto ‘hidden’ stakeholders who were crucial to the success or failure of the whole project.