Offering family intervention for psychosis in a forensic service; a quality improvement project.

There is strong evidence supporting the use of family intervention (FI) as standard practice for all families of service users with psychosis (NICE, 2014). In practice, most mental health services have been found to fall short of this ideal, most commonly due to limitations in resources such as dedicated time and training (Ince et al., 2016). Other barriers named in this systematic review include staff lack of confidence in skills, undervaluing the model of therapy and dominance of the medical model of treatment. This paper details a quality improvement project examining the provision and barriers to provision of FI in an NHS forensic mental health service consisting of medium secure wards, low secure wards and a community team. Information was gathered from a range of sources including electronic files, questionnaires and interviews. Approximately a third of the client group (n=208) were found to be eligible for FI on the basis of diagnosis and family contact, but records indicated that FI had only been considered for a third of those eligible. Barriers to delivery of FI in the service are identified alongside recommendations for service improvement. Whilst these are specific to the service studied, there are parallels with findings from other research, and the recommendations may be transferable to other services [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]