Personality disorder programme No longer a diagnosis of exclusion

Rex Haigh alongside DH, NOMS and Emergence colleagues look to the future of the National PD programme

On March 25, 2011, a team of five individuals involved with Department of Health National Personality Disorder Programme were tasked with delivering a plenary session at the Annual Conference of the British and Irish Group for the study of Personality Disorder http://www.bigspd.org.uk/

The purpose of the session was to provide an overview of policy developments and future intentions of the programme. As is often the case with such sessions this was one of the last sessions of the three-day conference and was faced with the problems associated with such: conference fatigue, the Friday feeling, demands of travel arrangements, and the morning after the conference dinner. As a group we determined that to combat these extraneous variables the session needed to be creative, engaging and provide real direction for the future.

Enter Prezi – the zooming presentation editor, billed as the antidote for death by Power Point, although with a propensity for causing motion sickness. This tool was chosen to cover the engaging objective we had set ourselves. Rather than simply outline the ‘policy developments and intentions for the future’ in a simple series of bullet points read aloud from a screen in a didactic lecture style, we wanted to reflect in our stage management the future of policy delivery.

Therefore, we decided to take our session into ‘the community’, in this scenario the audience provided this community: A mixture of members and ex-members of personality disorder services, individuals delivering services, policy-makers, researchers, academics and other individuals interested in the delivery of specific personality disorder interventions.

The stage management involved the team of presenters sitting amongst the audience enabling them to model the future of policy-making. Each presenter spoke to the audience from their position in the community and worked with each other as items appeared on the screen. This attempted to fulfil all three objectives: creative, engaging and real.

Our presentation identified that much work has been undertaken in forensic, non-forensic, education and training, service user partnership, and child domains. Reviews and consultations are now underway in relation to these areas with conclusions of each of these occurring over the coming months.

The future now looks somewhat different to the national directional lead provided by the programme at the Department of Health. Developments will now move to a bottom-up model – whereby the local communities will be driving the future landscape of services. The direction of services and integration with mainstream services will need to come from within local communities.

However, politics and economics will continue to prevail as an important influencing factor requiring navigation and careful consideration in service development and delivery.

The presentation closed with the posing of the question to the ‘community’: So, what do we need to do? This stimulated interesting questions and statements and ideas about real across agency and partnership working. The prevailing message being identified as ‘we need to ensure that we put intentions into actions with regard to partnership working across provider agencies, funding bodies, health and social care organizations, and academic institutions; and this needs to be done with regard to the prevailing political and economic climate’. This is achievable if we work together as a community committed to improving experiences and enabling both individuals and organizations to achieve their full potential.