Abstract
This article presents a brief overview of service user-led informal networks of care in therapeutic community practice before discussing the design and evolution of a new kind of network in one of the pilot services of the Department of Health National Programme for the Development of Services for People with Personality Disorder (National Institute for Mental Health in England, 2003a). This network employs well-established internet messaging and chat room facilities uniquely structured and moderated to encompass therapeutic community principles and provide equality of access across a huge mixed urban and rural catchment area. Both hardware and software are inexpensive, easily transferable to similar services and could be modified to suit other applications. The success of this system in allowing challenging work to proceed in a much reduced therapeutic community programme may offer the prospect of many more community-based therapeutic communities at the heart of new personality disorder services.
Highlights
MIKE RIGBY AND DALE ASHMANService innovation: a virtual informal network of care to support a ‘lean’ therapeutic community in a new rural personality disorder service
Service user-led informal networks of care have been developed to provide out-of-hours support and to extend the work of a number of day therapeutic communities for service users with moderate to severe personality disorders
To reduce the burden of care on the professional network beyond the therapeutic community. These systems have relied on a series of one-to-one contacts by telephone or text in order to coordinate a group response to a service user in distress
Summary
Service innovation: a virtual informal network of care to support a ‘lean’ therapeutic community in a new rural personality disorder service. This article presents a brief overview of service user-led informal networks of care in therapeutic community practice before discussing the design and evolution of a new kind of network in one of the pilot services of the Department of Health National Programme for the Development of Services for People with Personality Disorder (National Institute for Mental Health in England, 2003a). This network employs well-established internet messaging and chat room facilities uniquely structured and moderated to encompass therapeutic community principles and provide equality of access across a huge mixed urban and rural catchment area. In practice working well, they might suffer from not being able to guarantee the safety of a group-based response and carry a risk of loss of privacy
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