Exploring Staff Perceptions of Community Services

The demand for community-based mental health support has never been greater. To address such a need, new mental health community services are being co-developed with charities. These organisations’ valuable work, providing essential mental health services via a multifaceted intervention model, is often met with the additional difficulty of service users and staff barriers to accessing/delivering care. This study aimed to determine service-level, user-level and staff-level barriers in accessing/delivering care and service user satisfaction from the perspective of mental health practitioners. Hence, a Staff Perspectives on Service User Satisfaction and Barriers to Help Seeking Scale was created using modifications to validated questionnaires to measure (1) service user satisfaction, (2) service user level barriers, (3) service-level barriers, and (4) staff-level barriers. Results indicated a significant moderate positive relationship between service-level barriers and staff-level barriers. The relationship suggests interconnected challenges, where barriers related to the service may directly impact perceived barriers from staff. Future research should compare service user satisfaction outcomes from both the staff and the service users’ perspectives and gather further insights from service users.