This systematic review aims to synthesise the research on children’s perceptions and experiences of their involvement in a parent’s mental health care. After an extensive search and quality appraisal, 22 articles remained and were included in the review. The results show that children—although resourceful and with good intentions—frequently felt excluded. They hungered for information and felt their questions were abandoned. They also felt caught in a tumultuous life situation and struggled for support. Finally, they expressed the need to be seen and ultimately did not feel involved in their parent’s mental health care.

BACKGROUND: Disordered eating refers to unhealthy, sometimes excessive eating including so-called compensatory behaviours such as extreme dieting or voluntary vomiting. Between 24% and 30% of adolescent boys are suggested to engage in disordered eating, making it a significant public health issue. However, current instruments for assessing disordered eating among adolescents have been primarily developed and validated for girls and women, which may make for flawed assessment of boys. The aim of this study is to shed light on adolescent boys' perceptions of eating, weight, and food intake to better understand their perspectives in service of disordered eating research.

METHODS: This exploratory study was conducted from May to November 2022 using focus groups with a total of 39 adolescent boys (aged 12-19 years) who attended 7th to 12th grade in one of four schools in Southern Sweden. In addition, participants completed a form with questions on background demographics and eating habits. The transcripts of the focus group discussions were analysed using thematic analysis.

RESULTS: The quantitative data showed that around one third of the adolescent boys were overweight or obese. They ate at least one meal per day with the family and ate healthy food about five days per week and unhealthy food about three. Analysis of the qualitative data yielded six themes: The intertwined relationship between food and one's health, "Don't worry, food makes you happy," "To be hungry or not. That is the question," Boys DO care about appearances, Dieting and weight gain, and Disordered eating is a tricky matter.

CONCLUSION: Adolescent boys appeared to have a good understanding of food and healthy eating. They also experienced body positivity and seemed to have only minor issues regarding their weight. The primarily pathological perspective used to measure disordered eating among girls seems in need of revision to adhere to boys' thoughts and ideas regarding eating and weight.

Background

The aim of the study was to explore health care professionals’ experiences of participating in simulation-based training (SBT).

Methods

Individual semistructured interviews were conducted at two in-house training centres with 23 health care professionals representing different occupations, such as midwives, assistant nurses, registered nurses, and physicians among others. The data were analysed by thematic analysis.

Results

Five main themes emerged: Being able to grow in one's professional role, Coming together is fun, isn't it?, Being helped with a structured approach, Learning from feedback, and Creating the best out of (sur)realism. Overall, the health care professionals experienced SBT as positive, valuable, and as providing learning opportunities. Conversely, they expressed difficulties in communication and providing/receiving feedback, in particular when they were not known to the group or were less experienced in SBT.

Conclusions

SBT allows health care professionals to improve not only in the SBT process but also prepares them for clinical practice and to develop their communication and teamwork skills.

An increasing number of older people with severe mental illness (SMI) poses additional challenges to healthcare and social services. This scoping review aimed to investigate the life situation of older people living with severe mental illness and identify the research gaps in the existing literature. The current review followed the methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews by Arksey and O'Malley, consisting of five main stages: (1) identifying the research question (2) identifying relevant studies, (3) selecting the studies, (4) charting the data, and (5) collating, summarising, and reporting the results. An optional sixth stage, a consultation exercise, has also been used in this study: The scoping review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews PRISMA-ScR, and the databases PsychINFO Scopus, Cinahl, Web of Science and PubMed were used. A total of 24 studies were included in the review. The thematic analysis focused on: (1) the perspective of older people with SMI, (2) the perspective of healthcare professionals supporting older people with SMI, and (3) the perspective of informal carers supporting older people with SMI. The results describe the life situation of older people living with SMI, especially in relation to the older peoples' experiences of suffering and well-being. The staff and the informal carers need adequate knowledge to provide support to the older people with SMI. To gain greater knowledge about the life situation and support needed by older people with SMI, we strongly advocate additional research focusing on their own experiences.

Healthcare is often delivered by teams made up of culturally and demographically diverse members. Group diversity, for example, in terms of age, gender and/or culture, can bring a range of benefits, but also complex challenges for the functioning of healthcare teams. The literature suggests that cultural diversity is the most difficult issue for these teams to manage. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore the perceived needs of healthcare professionals when working in culturally diverse teams. Data were collected through individual interviews with 23 healthcare professionals working in two hospitals in one municipality in southern Sweden. The data were analysed using an inductive content analysis approach. In the process of the analysis, two main categories of needs emerged: Favourable working conditions and guidance, and Commonalities. The findings highlight the need for the right work and team climate, as well as leadership, for culturally diverse teams to function well. In addition, the implementation and communication of rules and regulations, clarity of roles, and a shared understanding of cultural diversity, language, and the culture of care are important for these teams. By uncovering the needs expressed by healthcare professionals in relation to working in culturally diverse teams, our research provides important insights into the key enablers of the benefits of team diversity in the healthcare context.

Co-supervision of doctoral theses is on the rise worldwide, but we know little of the relational dynamics of the co-supervisory team and doctoral student. These teams often must work together for several years, during which supervisors may come and go. We interviewed 19 doctoral students about their experiences of co-supervision and found a complex team climate characterised by prior relations, merit- and network-gaining activities, and 'cushioning' adopted by supervisors to support the student during stressful periods. Doctoral students viewed themselves as passive and dependent - as pawns in a bigger game - suggesting that co-supervision might uphold the traditionally strong hierarchical structure of academia. We therefore suggest that all co-supervision teams discuss the roles and structure of supervision before commencing a research project.

Organizations, communities and societies are faced with ever more complex challenges such as public health problems. Attempts to address such challenges require involvement of various actors ranging from state and regional authorities to non-governmental organizations and individuals. Additionally, many of those that are delivering social care services are with different professional backgrounds and belong to different departments. Such partnerships create ground for complex relationships between the actors involved in each project. As a result, such actors find themselves in complex and volatile contexts where the questions of who, when and where to take the lead are, often, ambiguous. Leadership is an integral part of any organization’s practices (Schedlitzki et al.,2023). However, theories of leadership have primarily focused on boosting individual leaders’ successes within systems, thus curtaining the relational aspects of leadership. Like Uhl-Bien(2021a), we understand leadership as a co-creation. Yet, the knowledge on the necessary competence to manage such projects and what enables cooperation and adaptability is limited. Thus, our overall aim is to further the understanding of how co-creative leadership can enable interconnectivity and adaptability in complex systems.

The context for this presentation is a new project on competency supply in social care services. A general shortage of different kinds of professionals has urged the municipality in a medium sized town in Sweden to create cross departmental projects which seek to explore new ways of managing staff shortage issues. Through follow-up research in the form of process evaluations, our focus is on how the project affects the larger system in which it is part of. Our research will be exploratory, and informed by complex system perspectives, such as complexity leadership theory (Uhl-Bien etal., 2007; Uhl-Bien, 2021b), generative emergence (Lichtenstein, 2014; 2021) and complex systems perspective (McGill, 2021), on the one hand, and co-creative leadership perspectives (Denis et al., 2012; Kjellström et al., 2020), on the other.

Our ambition is to address the following research questions:

1. How a cross department project evolves over time and how what happens can be illustrated and explained based on theories of complexity?
2. If and how a co-creative leadership is used, and why and how certain approaches to leadership allow adaptive responses, while others hinder them?
3. How continuous improvement is integrated in the management of the project?
4. How is leadership developed in daily practice throughout the project?

We will utilize a mixed methods approach, and, as a first step, use shadowing of project meetings (Czarniawska, 2007). Through shadowing, we aim to “be there” when the practices occur, and to see first-hand what, and how it, happens. This would allow us to notice things that our study objects do not necessarily think of sharing during a regular interview. The shadowing process will start in September 2023, and we plan to have a learning seminar with all parties involved in November 2023, where our initial observations are shared with researchers and municipality professionals. Our goal for the conference is to present our early findings and discuss future avenues of this project which is under way.

BACKGROUND: Although team-based work is deemed key to improving the quality of national health care systems, adverse events related to teamwork account for up to one third of all incidents. Health care teams are typically multiprofessional and diverse in many aspects, but cultural diversity is one of the most challenging.

PURPOSES: The objective of this review is to systematically analyze the literature to better understand the impact of cultural diversity in health care teams on team processes as well as team and patient outcomes. This study also explores the conditions that enable or hinder team functioning.

METHODOLOGY: Through a systematic integrative literature review, this study builds on the input-process-output-context framework. Multiple searches of the main databases led to identifying 43 relevant articles.

FINDINGS: The results suggest that, when not proactively managed, cultural diversity may have a negative effect on team communication and integration, increasing team conflict and thereby negatively influencing team performance, team climate, and patient safety, both directly and indirectly. Yet, when managed properly and in the presence of engaged and culturally sensitive leadership, cultural training, and open and transparent procedures, cultural diversity in health care teams can be an asset to health care organizations. Analyzing and aggregating these findings into an integrative framework, our study identifies several themes and a research agenda for future studies on culturally diverse health care teams.

PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Our findings suggest that culturally diverse health care teams experience a number of challenges, pointing to the need for action or structures that enable these teams to perform better, such as emphasizing learning and allowing team members time to get to know each other outside work.

Team-based work is considered key to improving the quality of national health systems, yet adverse events in relation to teamwork account for up to a third of all incidents. Teams in healthcare are typically multi-professional and diverse in many dimensions, with cultural diversity being one of the biggest challenges. The objective of this systematic integrative literature review is to analyse the literature to better understand the impact of cultural diversity in healthcare teams on team processes and team and patient outcomes. The study also explores the conditions that enable or hinder team functioning. The results of the review based on 43 articles suggest that cultural diversity threatens to have a negative effect on team processes, team performance, team climate, and patient safety, both directly and indirectly. Culturally sensitive leadership, cultural training, open and transparent procedures appear to mitigate issues associated with cultural differences in healthcare teams. Based on these findings and utilizing SWOT, we identify strengths and weaknesses as well as future research opportunities and threats to the field’s future development.

Background: Mental illness, such as depression, anxiety disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and different addictive diseases, has increased among young adults over the last decade. Mental illness is associated with distress and problems functioning in social activities. Healthcare centres, that is, primary care, serve as the first point of contact with healthcare professionals for those young adults and provide outpatient medical and nursing care covering both physical and mental illness.

Objective: To explore experiences of primary care among young adults with mental illness.

Methods: A systematic literature review was conducted that followed the method of Bettany–Saltikov and McSherry. A keyword search was performed in various databases, and after a quality assessment 23 articles were included in the review.

Results: Young adults' experiences from primary care are described in four categories  – Facing difficulties to accept help, relational preconditions, structural and organisational hindrances  and  satisfaction  with  youth-focused  mental  health  interventions. Young adults  with  mental  illness  experience  many  difficulties  in  accessing  and  receiving proper help from primary care. Further, they did not believe in recovery from mental illness, and they also expressed a lack of mental health literacy.

Conclusion: While  being  the  first  contact  with  healthcare  professionals,  primary  care needs to adjust its services to address the growing group of young adults suffering from mental illness. It is necessary to provide tailored guidelines and interventions in primary care for young adults with mental illness, and the Tidal Model may improve the contacts with young adults in primary care.