Staff experiences of significant moments in systemic team formulation on adult inpatient mental health wards.

Although studies have found potentially positive benefits and challenges of team formulation practice, what the research field is currently lacking is context around why team formulations are seemingly having this impact. In this practice-based research, I aimed to examine my practice of systemic team formulation, and to explore what moments team members experienced as being transformative and/or significant in the process of systemic team formulation. I conducted focus group interviews with staff at an acute inpatient mental health service, where I work, to explore this topic. I analysed the data using an interpretive phenomenological analysis framework for focus groups (Palmer et al., 2010) with some systemic adaptations of my own. There was some overlap of findings with regards to the benefits and challenges of team formulation cited in other studies, but there were also some novel findings about what staff members found to be significant in the process of systemic team formulation, such as giving team members permission to think systemically and relationally about client systems and themselves. There were also themes around some of the dominant discourses in acute inpatient mental health wards which systemic team formulation, perhaps inadvertently, challenges. These findings may give insight into the key change moments for teams in the process of systemic team formulation, and may have tentative implications for the practice of team formulation more broadly, and for the practice, training, and supervision of systemically influenced team formulation practitioners. Key words: Systemic team formulation, team formulation, acute inpatient mental health, change process research, systemic therapy, interpretive systemic phenomenological analysis