Personality disorder programme No longer a diagnosis of exclusion

From the Thames Valley Initiative stable, (which was the largest of the community PD Pilots selected in 2003) a new service has quietly been setting up over the last year. It joins the existing ‘hubs’ at Reading, Oxford, Aylesbury and Milton Keynes – in the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. It uses the same overall clinical model as the others (four phases: engagement; assessment; intensive therapy; and recovery), although there are several interesting new features:

• A mixture of DBT, psychodrama/action methods and group analytic therapy as the definitive therapy groups
• A ‘three way agreement’ for ensuring good shared care with locality services
• Embedded within an existing day services programme, in which people can prepare themselves for the intensive therapy at their own pace
• A special policy on clinical records, somewhat like maternity case notes, where they are mostly ‘owned’ by the service users themselves
• Chance for members of the programme to join a social enterprise ‘Green Care’ project in the nearby council-run nursery
• A new modification of non-residential therapeutic community models: ‘The Median TC’ – median because it uses median group size (12-30) for the main groups; because it is intermediate in ‘therapy dose’ between mini-TCs (about 6 hours per week) and day-TCs (up to 30 hours per week), with 10 hours of staffed groups per week.

Thames Valley Initiative (www.thamesvalleyinitiative.net) has been running information sessions since September 2009, a set-up programme since January 28, which finished on 1 July with a Thames boat trip from nearby Windsor and major ‘faith lunch’ picnic on a lovely summer day. So that’s what we all did with the left-over coffee funds that we had collected from each other over the months!
The programme is now running a normal Thames Valley structure – with a ‘preparation and assessment’ group one morning per week, and the main 3-day 10 hours ‘median-TC’ programme. For more info, contact Rex Haigh, the consultant psychiatrist there: rexhaigh@nhs.net