Practice Development in Mental Health
Listening to practitioners, and placing the resources where they can make a real impact.
'Practice Development' in Mental Health
- The Need
- The Idea
- The Practicalitites
The Need
The education and training of the mental health workforce needs to change in order to keep pace with how modern mental health services need to be delivered. The Workforce Action Team has produced a Capable Practitioner report, which outlines a framework of capabilities that broadly encompass the knowledge, skills and attitudes required by the workforce of mental health practitioners. Many organisations have commissioned the growing range of flexible post-graduate education courses, which seek to target and customise training to meet local need. These have achieved a limited success at credentialing practitioners, through successful attendance levels and completion of set assignments. However, transferring the dissemination of information (the evidence) into routine clinical practice remains the next challenge.
Practice Development has now become an essential challenge to the workforce, of linking the research-based evidence of clinical theory with the practice-based evidence of clinical reality. Training initiatives should no longer stand-alone, they need to be the initial stage of a fuller package of education and support. The aim of developing high quality services will be achieved by going beyond just delivering the message, to close modelling and supervision of its implementation within the available resources and creativity of the personnel in local services.
The on-going credibility of the trainers will be sustained by closer contact with the point of service delivery, and the publishing of ideas and evidence from routine clinical practice, not just artificially resourced research programmes. Credibility for local and national services requires a move on from the theoretical frameworks of a Capable Practitioner, to the practical realisation of Creative Capability (David Juriansz). The individual practitioner, team and wider network of support are clearer about effective ideas, and in the effectiveness of how they function.