Derbyshire Healthcare are developing a new treatment pathway for people with significant emotional regulation and relationship difficulties: people who may fit with diagnostic criteria for Borderline or Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorders. The lead, Dr Dave Woods, says:
We aim to improve peoples’ experience and their outcomes by providing high quality interventions delivered by highly trained and well-supported staff. We also aim to reduce our reliance on expensive and often less than ideal out of area hospital stays by improving access to intensive community based treatments. This fits with the aspirations of the NHS Long Term Plan to “eliminate inappropriate out of area placements for non-specialist acute care by 2021”, and thus reinvest monies in intensive and effective community-based support.
The Pathway will include existing Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) individual and groupwork and a new Structured Clinical Management offer delivered within each CMHT. We are also looking at expanding this offer in the future to provide greater choice. The pathway will be accessible to people who are open to the adult CMHTs, although access to DBT treatment will also be considered for people open to other trust services. If you think you would benefit from these services, please discuss with your CMHT or other worker.
Structured Clinical Management is an evidenced based approach that enables generalist mental health practitioners to work effectively with people with borderline personality disorder. SCM is a structured and supportive approach. There is an emphasis on building skills, problem-solving, effective crisis planning, medication review and follow-up if appointments are missed.
As well as a new Clinical Lead role, we are recruiting to a total of 20 Pathway Practitioner posts (10 of these posts are new and 10 re-engineered from existing roles). The Pathway Practitioners will have access to enhanced training and supervision and will be working with reduced caseloads in an intensive way. We will also be expanding our DBT services and are recruiting into new psychologists posts to support this.
As of late January 2020 we have recruited into 7 practitioner posts and 2 part time psychologist posts, and we are interviewing again this very week. We have significant staff training planned over the next month, with almost 70 targeted training places on 3 different courses. We aim to skill up our whole organisation to work more compassionately and effectively!
We are very excited about the opportunities to improve our services through the Emotion Regulation Pathway and hope that the benefits begin to be felt as our pathway grows and develops!
Sue Wheatcroft 