Picturing healthcare: a photovoice study of how healthcare is experienced by service users in a mental-health low threshold service.

Background: A recent policy change dictates that all mental healthcare in Norway must be referred and documented in the medical record of the service users. This has not been the case within low threshold mental health services, which is services without referrals, social arenas where healthcare professionals are available and where service users themselves can choose to attend based on their self-reported needs. This challenges the idea of "healthcare" being a medical term as opposed to experienced and expressed by the service user. A new healthcare understanding that includes the service users' voices are thus needed, and the aim of this study is to explore how service users within low threshold services, understand, describe, and experience healthcare.

Methods: The present study has used the photovoice approach to explore how four service users perceive and experience healthcare in a low threshold context. The chosen photovoice method enabled service users to reflect upon and communicate their experiences first visually by individual pictures and thereafter reflective texts emerged through seven workshops. A qualitative thematic analysis was performed based on the pictures, notes and audiotaped material from the workshops.

Results: The analysis found three main themes showing how healthcare is experienced: availability of people, availability of places and availability of activities. This is illustrated through the following sub-themes: First, common community, good relations and fellowship, second, flexible and easily accessible support, which includes the opportunity to spend time and to try things out in a safe environment, and third, facilitation and motivation for participation and activity, given the opportunity to have a meaningful role and be seen as a resourceful human being.

Conclusions: A new understanding of healthcare is needed in the context of recovery-oriented low threshold services, as today`s largely medical understanding of healthcare is challenging to connect to a relational, recovery-oriented understanding of healthcare. As healthcare are to be documented in service users medical record, further research should explore how to document healthcare based on a new or extended, relational understanding of healthcare.