If you want to change the world you have to start with yourself: The impact of staff reflective practice within the Offender Personality Disorder pathway

Abstract

The offender personality disorder (OPD) pathway was implemented in 2012 to help improve services for people with personality difficulties within the criminal justice system. The OPD pathway acknowledges the importance of supervision, training and reflective practice for staff working with this client group and such activities have therefore been embedded within this initiative. Despite the research from this pathway identifying benefits to both staff and service users, there is a gap in knowledge about the impact of reflective practice. This study aims, therefore, to increase this knowledge base by exploring staff’s experience and perception of reflective practice as part of the OPD pathway programme. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews were completed with 32 members of National Health Service and National Probation Service staff within offender management teams and approved premises in the North East of England. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data, resulting in the emergence of four key themes relating to the utility of reflective practice sessions. The findings suggest that reflective practice is useful, however, there are some barriers to attending sessions. The findings have implications for service delivery and workforce development within the OPD pathway programme and more widely within NPS.

An evaluation of the implementation of reflective practice supervision standards in the national probation service

“…Again, in previous research, we found a high level of support for the provision of clinical supervision by staff working on the Offender Personality Disorder Programme. The OPD Pathway makes use of reflective practice sessions whereby staff meet -voluntarily -'to discuss team or individual issues; consider their emotional reactions, thoughts and ways in which they could adapt; and develop their clinical practice' (Webster et al, 2020). Importantly, Webster et al (2020: 290) suggest that reflective practice is a useful endeavour for people working in probation:…”

“…Here, Webster et al (2020) are describing action learning sets used in the Offender Personality Disordered (OPD) Pathway which were part of the original SEEDS programme in 2010. SEEDS2, which began in 2018, was developed by the Effective Probation Practice team in the National Probation Service and is intended to reintroduce the centrality of serviceuser engagement and upskilling probation staff.…”

Understanding offender managers’ views and experiences of psychological consultations

“…Future research should further explore the reflective nature of the PICS and how it benefits the OMs in more ways than directly informing their working practices as was found in this research and recently in the work of Webster et al (2020). In addition, the effectiveness of the PICS in relation to the aims of the service could be further explored using quantitative methods of analyses.…”

“…Indeed, reflective practices have recently been found to be the most important aspect of the OPD pathway. Webster et al (2020) investigated the effectiveness of specific group reflective practice sessions, offered within the North and South Tyne clusters of the NPS. They found that the reflective sessions were extremely beneficial to the OMs in a number of ways.…”

“…To date, the few studies that have investigated the effectiveness of the consultation process specifically for OMs are limited to the areas of London (Knauer et al, 2017; Shaw et al, 2012), Yorkshire/Humberside (McMullan et al, 2014; Ramsden et al, 2016) and North and South Tyne (Webster et al, 2020). This is important because the services offered within the OPD Pathway, including the consultation services, currently vary across regions.…”