The good news is that the Service is having a Workshop, in December, for Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners, ‘Improving Engagement and Recovery’, the bad news is that it suggests the haemorrhaging [see previous post] can be treated by PWPs learning from each other. Inspection of the day’s programme, suggests that there is no evidence-base for the emerging recommendations. Rather they are the received-wisdom of the ‘movers and shakers’ amongst PWPs. One is reminded that ‘turkeys do not vote f or Christmas’, and similarly, PWP’s are unlikely to countenance that their modus operandi is fundamentally flawed.
The Service will be integrated into the Department of Health and Social Care, but there is no hurry to do this.The Department will likely focus on operational matters, such as redundancies and cost-savings and it is unlikely to consider whether the Service for adults is worth the £1 billion a year spent on it.
Clinicians who are not PWPs, likely have serious misgivings over their operation, but dare not put their head above the parapet. This week a clinician in secondary care told me of a PWP who had administered the PHQ-9, the score was high because the client had been bereaved, the PWP asked the client to complete the test ‘as if they had not been bereaved’ – so much for the claimed reliable data set.
Dr Mike Scott