To ascertain the views and experiences of mental health consumers regarding the availability and quality of care and treatment received for their physical health needs.
People diagnosed with mental illness have higher occurrence of physical health problems. Responsive health care services are crucial for prevention and management of physical health problems, and for reducing disparities in health between people diagnosed with mental illness and those who are not. There is limited research giving voice to consumer perspectives on their experiences with health care providers.
Exploratory qualitative.
Focus group interviews with mental health consumers accessed via a consumer network group in a region of Australia (n = 31). All interview audio recordings were transcribed professionally. Interviews were thematically analysed.
The main themes were: symptomising; failure to act and alertness to prejudice. The first two themes were consumer perceptions of the actions and behaviours of health professionals, and the third describes consumer responses to these behaviours and actions. Consumers described increased risks of illness and death because of undiagnosed physical illness despite their physical health advice-seeking as the reason for the health consultation.
Health care providers' non-recognition of physical health problems presents a clear example of a significant and potentially life threatening health inequity. The service provider responses described by participants suggest that mental health consumers' physical health needs may not be taken seriously.
Clinicians need to take seriously the physical health needs and concerns of people with mental illness. Nurses can play a crucial role in the prevention of diagnostic overshadowing as part of a broader direction of balancing biomedical perspectives with other approaches to health care.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 18. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 28 March 2023.
All research outputs
#2,507,021
of 32,615,979 outputs
Outputs from Journal of Clinical Nursing
#453
of 6,154 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#31,721
of 334,785 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of Clinical Nursing
#6
of 111 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 32,615,979 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 92nd percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 6,154 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a little more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 7.2. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 92% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 334,785 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 90% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 111 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 94% of its contemporaries.
