INTRODUCTION

The second comparative Trans-national Report is based on the Research and Needs Analysis. We can define the needs analysis as a research activity with the aim of   identifying and making explicit the requirements (and gaps) which were identified from the different contexts, which included organisations, services, systems, professional categories, social classes, etc. It is necessary to underline that, in our case, we were interested in “formative” training needs, in order to obtain useful information for creating a training model (in the shape ofa curriculum) which would be consistent with our area of study and intervention – Mental Health Workers engaged in community services across the EU.
We organized the research so that it directly involved the system elements (its key actors: workers and users). This was indispensable as our purpose was to work out the balance and trend of these training and professional systems (which people would be most suitable to train) and the features of suitable competencies (the ways in which to train a variety of people).
The research has been realized by the means of three converging methodologies:
SWOT Analysis, foregoing the field research, allowed by the information coming from the desk analysis carried out during the previous phase of research and context analysis;
Field survey, accomplished in the partner countries (Italy, Scotland, Czech Republic, Latvia, Netherlands) by using “ad hoc” instruments to gather quantitative data;
Qualitative analysis, accomplished through focus groups with users.
The SWOT analysis enabled us to orient and define the field of action. By its means we were able to prepare the field research tools. This - jointly with the desk analysis used for the previous comparative report – gave us the interpretation grid for most of the results.
We considered it necessary to map the “perceived training needs” straight from workers through quantitative-type instruments. Moreover – aside from these needs - we wanted to investigate and highlight the evaluations made by workers about their professional situation and their training in terms of competencies and activities they carry out during their ongoing practice.
Finally, besides the quantitative survey, we supplemented our analysis by focus groups with users. In spite of the small number of participants, this produced interesting and significant results.
We have to acknowledge some methodological limitations. We chose not to rule out any interviewed subjects – even though they were different from each other in number, gender and age – so that we wouldn’t lose any useful information. Moreover, we judged that, although there was a certain range within the sample, it wasn’t so wide as to significantly affect the statistical reliability.  In fact, we weren’t able to identify comparable facilities and services in terms of: a) average number of staff and users; b) typology of treatment and care supply (traditional in-patient facilities vs community-based services); c) typology of management (public, private, mixed). This restriction was due to major differences within the supply and allocation of mental health services in the partner countries.
In the first part of this document we delineate the most important aspects of the research and discuss the meaningful outcomes. We will start by giving a short explanation of the SWOT methodology and its main outcomes arising from research and context analysis. In the second part we will outline the sample participating in our research - facilities, services, workers, users – and will analyze and discuss the outcomes in detail. In the third part we will introduce and comment on the information from focus groups. The overall discussion of the results has been included in the conclusive section of the Resource book.