ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Public Mental Health
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1644734
Staff feedback within an acute mental health hospital: a qualitative interview study
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Kent Tizard Centre, Canterbury, United Kingdom
- 2University of Birmingham Department of Social Policy Sociology and Criminology, Birmingham, United Kingdom
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Efforts/interventions to improve and maintain good standards of mental health care for people receiving acute hospital care are necessary and common. These interventions always include providing feedback to frontline staff, feedback playing a major role in all such managerial and clinical efforts. The current literature regarding feedback rarely describes the current feedback environment within which new efforts/interventions occur, but often do when interventions fail because of current staff practices and cultures. Feedback provided by peers, patients, practitioners and managements is always present within existing feedback environments. Therefore, this study provides a detailed account from interviews with frontline staff of one acute mental health hospital. The results showed that frontline staff use and value informal feedback between staff who work together as a team, as well as formal feedback structures, and that the focus and mechanisms for feedback varied between professional groups. Feedback for nurses was focused upon responding quickly to potentially harmful events and for frontline psychology staff upon formal structured feedback. The paper concluded that new feedback to support desired changes should take account of existing feedback characteristics and new ideas for how best to use feedback to improve current in-patient acute hospital environments and safety.
Keywords: mental health care, Staff experiences, Feedback, Organisational support, multi professional collaboration
Received: 10 Jun 2025; Accepted: 27 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Deveau and Bradshaw. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Roy Deveau, University of Kent Tizard Centre, Canterbury, United Kingdom
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