Mental Health after Covid Hospitalisation (MACH) service: exploratory qualitative study

3. Conclusions

3.1. Limitations and possibility for future research

While this research has highlighted important areas of learning about the MACH service, it has some limitations.

Potentially the most significant limitation of this research is the absence of the views and perspectives of MACH patients, with the research presented relying on the views of service staff as a proxy indicator for how patients experienced MACH. Learning about the experiences of MACH patients could provide additional insights and potentially a broader understanding about the set up, delivery and impact of the service.

Due to time and resource pressures, aspects of the research had to be conducted at pace, meaning that specific methodological choices had to be made. For example, most people participated in this research via a focus group, comprised of clinicians delivering local MACH services, rather than individual interviews. While this had the advantage of enabling the collection of perspectives from several people at the same time, some participants may have been reluctant to speak in a group setting (as noted in methodological reviews of focus groups^[1]).

The group dynamics of focus groups can influence participant responses to questions. The composition of this group contained staff of varying seniority and specialism (e.g. nursing, clinical psychology and occupational therapy) which may have influenced the responses participants gave. Further research, drawing on the findings in this report, on the experiences of different professionals about their experiences of MACH using individual interviews could provide additional insights, as well as potentially allowing comparisons between the different specialisms involved in providing MACH.

A further limitation of this research is that it was not possible to explore in detail potential differences in how MACH has been implemented across different health boards. Conducting further research on the implementation and delivery of MACH, could enable exploration of the barriers and facilitators to service design and delivery within specific health boards and how they compare to one another.

How to access background or source data

• may be made available on request, subject to consideration of legal and ethical factors. Please contact socialresearch@gov.scot for further information.