Evaluation of a professional development experience designed to equip school support staff with skills to facilitate youth mental health promotion

Abstract

Background: Public policy across the world is increasingly focusing on the role of mental health promotion in whole of health strategies. There is a growing evidence-base that mental health promotion, delivered by trained facilitators, is effective in promoting self-awareness and self-care to prevent the damaging effects of ongoing stress in one’s life and to promote early detection of any possible emerging mental health problems. Within Australia, however, few clinicians or school staff are confident or trained in mental health promotion.

Aims: This paper reports the results of a two-day training designed for facilitators of a mental health program for secondary-school students. The goal was to develop facilitators’ knowledge and understanding of best practice in youth mental health promotion and to increase their confidence in delivering the program.

Design: A mixed methods evaluation assessed the impact that a solution-focused training program had on participating facilitators.

Methods: A questionnaire was created and included eight quantitative items and one open ended, qualitative question. Twenty-seven nurses and guidance officers from central Queensland were recruited via convenience sampling and data were analysed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis.

Results: The evaluation revealed that participants’ perception of their ability to facilitate a youth mental health program significantly improved after completing the training. Qualitative data indicated that participants found the professional development experience to be valuable, provide useful and transferable skills, and believed it to be necessary for mental health promotion work.

Conclusion: By providing detailed description of the program’s content and processes, other mental health professionals may be inspired to further develop effective learning experiences.

Keywords:

• child and youth
• evaluation
• facilitation
• mental health
• mental health promotion
• nursing
• resilience

Acknowledgement

The Queensland Government, Accelerate Partnerships Grant provided funding for this study. We thank Melanie Durston for her assistance in proof reading.

Disclosure statement

There are no conflicts of interest to declare.

Authorship declaration

All authors contributed to this manuscript in these ways: MM design, conception, major literature review and presentation of findings (80%); BAK design, and analysis (20%); CH literature review and analysis (20%); JD analysis (20%); CW analysis (10%); PH (conception and analysis 20%).

ORCID

Margaret McAllister http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1181-1610

Bruce Allen Knight http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6627-378X

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Queensland Government: [Grant Number Accelerate Partnerships].