A survey of mental health nursing students who witness self-harm / injury (SHSI) amongst service users during placement.

Title
A survey of mental health nursing students who witness self-harm / injury (SHSI)
amongst service users during placement.
Background
Self-harm and self-injury (SHSI) behaviour is a commonly observed within mental
health services (Klonsky et al, 2003). This has been recognised to be an international
health care problem (Hawton et al, 2009; Hawton et al, 2012). Mental health nursing students, whilst on placement, would likely be working with service users who might have SHSI thus could elicit strong emotional reactions (Karman et al, 2015; Patterson et al, 2007; Wilstrand et al, 2007). Few studies address the personal impact of witnessing SHSI upon the mental health nursing students whilst they are on clinical placements.
Aims
The overarching aim is to support mental health nursing students’ mental health and wellbeing whilst on clinical placements consequently combating attrition thus improving students’ retention and outcome.
Methods
Four universities collaborated to conduct this study using a survey hosted on
Qualtrics. This preliminary data was drawn from December 2022 until March 2023. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis were used to analysis the data.
Results
86 participants consented to the survey. With 74.9% undergraduate mental health nursing students and 70.5% females. Mean age 31.44±9.04. Previous number of years (mean) of health care employment 7.22±5.15. 62.3% of students were placed in NHS clinic setting. 23.9% of the participants had previous personally experienced selfharm and 40.9% had family and friend who had SHSI experienced. Cutting (36.4%), headbanging (33%) and ligature (26.1%) were the most common SHSI witnessed by the mental health nursing students. Students were empathetic towards the service users SHSI struggles even though they might find it “emotionally hard”. Most students echoed the needs for debriefing post witnessing SHSI. Most placements seemed to be supportive post SHSI incidences however a minority of students reported that some staff made verbal comments such as that students were “too gullible or too soft” or “get told to get used to it”.
Discussion/Conclusions
Preliminary three-month data provided some insight towards witnessing SHSI. This ongoing study hope to be able to report a larger data set in the next 9 months thus will be able to provide a fully understand upon the impacts of witnessing SHSI upon the mental health nursing students whilst they are on clinical placements