National Personality Disorder
Development Programme

The services

Three hubs
The project is designed around a “hub” with a non-residential therapeutic community in each county: in Oxford, Reading and High Wycombe. Each has various outreach and inreach services, and works closely with relevant statutory and non-statutory partners. Ex-service users (“experts by experience”) are employed to help ensure the services are acceptable and accessible to those who use them.

Berkshire has a long-running service, at Winterbourne, which will be funded to develop further, along the lines of the service model, in mid-2005. Oxfordshire has started extensive outreach services in Wallingford, Witney and Banbury, and opened its day unit at the Warneford in March 2005. More details are available here. Buckinghamshire will be recruiting some outreach staff in early 2004, then more later to open the day unit in autumn 2005.

This page will give more details and links when all the services are up and running.

Four tiers
It is based on a non-residential clinical model with four tiers, and numerous possible care pathways.

·           The first tier is “assertive assessment”, and works in a range of informal and formal settings to engage service users. A major part of its work will to work across settings to facilitate attitude change and effective clinical work. Self-referral is the final common pathway for all those coming to the treatment part of the service, whoever initially makes the referral.

·           The second tier involves various programmes of therapy, including those taking place in smaller population centres. It includes, for example, a “therapeutic risk assessment course” for parents whose children have been taken into statutory care. 

·           The third tier is based in each county hub, and is an intensive treatment programme using various specific therapeutic models, all within a planned therapeutic environment based on a modified therapeutic community (TC) approach.

·           The fourth tier is for disengagement from the service, with facilities to help engagement in training and work. It is primarily run by ex-service users and provides a socially supportive environment to meet continuing developmental needs.

Twenty six new staff
Across the three counties, the project will employ nineteen new clinical staff (in addition to those already working at Winterbourne TC). Seven others, including ex-service users, as well as those for administration, project management, research and training, will also be recruited.

Although staff will all be located in a specific base, they will be encouraged to have secondments and placements in other parts of the project, and to other pilot projects, as part of their continuing professional development.

Staff will also be involved in promoting the service and wider developments in personality disorder work through participation in local and wider professional networks

Early ideas of what the service would look like are available here