Using interactive theatre in education to explore how healthcare decision-making can cause inadvertent trauma

Complex decisions that mental healthcare professionals make every day can have far-reaching influences on service users’ lives. This article describes working with a service user who had been detained under the Mental Health Act. She helped to turn her experience into an educational drama that was performed by nursing students to other learner nurses. The resulting presentation was a form of ‘clickers theatre’ that allowed the audience to make decisions as the play progressed. The project aimed to raise awareness of the impact of clinical decision-making and the inadvertent trauma that poorly thought out decisions can have on service users.