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Social therapy is an emerging model of care for people with a personality disorder but current professional education programmes for health-care staff fail to meet the needs of both staff and patients. A project at Ashworth Hospital, in collaboration with the University of Central Lancashire, is attempting to address this issue through the development of a framework of professional occupational standards from which it is hoped academic and voational accreditation will be possible.

As part of the UKCC Nursing in Secure Environments project, all pre-registration programme providers for mental health and learning disability were contacted and invited to complete a questionnaire concerning their involvement with, and preparation of, nurses for working in these settings. Details are provided of the analysis of these questionnaires, along with parallel data captured from the project's focus groups and from focused interviews which provided a commentary of the practitioners' views concerning the adequacy of pre-registration preparation for work in these specialised environments.

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