Mental health nurses from two large mental health care organizations in the Netherlands were invited to partici- pate in the study. The MHNs provided care to older community dwelling or hospitalized clients with a severe mental illness and their families. The clients were at least 60 years of age.
To ensure that the MHNs’ perception and content of caregiver support were explored in diverse situations, maximum purposive sampling was used [20–22]. Conse- quently, MHNs with diverse characteristics were included (gender, education level, and years of experience) and with different contexts (hospital vs community, organization) were involved. These characteristics may influence the perspectives and content of caregiver support.
As graduate nurses (i.e., with a bachelor’s degree) are the in majority in the teams their personal views and ex- periences concerning caregiver support carried the greatest weight. It was considered important that the graduate nurses would feel at ease during the interviews. Therefore they were free to choose to participate either in an individual interview or a focus group. Based on the level of education of the applied and academic mental health nurses we expected a “senior” best practice on