Special Measures is a two-year project, funded by a DCP grant, which aims to promote equality and diversity in gathering feedback and measuring outcomes for children and young people with learning disabilities.

The Child Outcomes Research Consortium (CORC) has been hosting and participating in the project that has seen collaboration across the DCP Faculty for Children, Young People and their Families, Experts by Experience and other interested organisations and practitioners.

It will also link with the BPS Divisions of Educational and Child Psychology and Occupational Psychology and DCP Faculty for People with Intellectual Disabilities.

• Special Measures Project - July 2020 update

• Stream 3: Hearing the Voice

  This document contains an interim summary grid signposting some of the relevant links for useful resources, people, practice developments and organisations we’ve linked with during this project.

• Hearing the ‘voice’ of and measuring change in children and young people with moderate, severe or multiple and profound learning disabilities

  This initiative is part of a wider project funded by the British Psychological Society (BPS), the ‘Special Measures’ Project, which aims to progress practice and practice-guidance on outcome measures and methods for hearing the voice and gaining feedback from children and young people with learning disabilities, their families and networks.

• Use of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire for Monitoring the Wellbeing of Children and Young People With Learning Disabilities

  Analysis and report by Professor Eric Emerson to present new data, extracted from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study, on the face validity, factorial structure and reliability of the SDQ when used with children with learning disabilities.

  - Read the full report on the use of the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire

  - Read a summary report on the use of the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire

"Special” Measures: promoting equality and diversity in feedback and outcome measures for children and young people with learning disabilities

09:30-12:00

Friday 12 February 2021

This is a free virtual workshop for people working with children and young people with learning disabilities, their families and networks.

This interactive workshop aims to progress practice and practice-guidance on measures and methods for children and young people with learning disabilities (LD), their families and networks of support.

Learn more about this event and how to sign-up to attend.

Lucy Marks MBE, Independent Consultant Clinical Psychologist

I have had over 30 years’ experience developing primary care psychology services in East London and I am delighted to have started a piece of work for the DCP to:

1. Develop a position paper on best practice in clinical psychology in primary care, which can be used by commissioners, provider trusts and psychologists to develop high quality work in this area
2. Develop a new network for Clinical Psychologists with an interest in working in primary care.

The work will cover the lifespan and is not just limited to adults. There has been considerable interest from a variety of Clinical Psychologists who have started to get involved.

This is a good time for this work because GPs are particularly interested in developing their capacity to manage mental health issues given the impact of Covid-19 and there are opportunities for innovation with the development of Primary Care Networks.

If you would like to:

• Find out more about best practice in primary care clinical psychology
• Contribute to or comment on the position paper on primary care clinical psychology
• Join the network of Psychologists in Primary Care

Please contact [email protected]

We have had our first meeting of the Core Advisory Group, which was well attended.

Annette Schlosser and Lawrence Moulin are jointly chairing and the work is supported by Andrew Baldwin from the BPS.

Key clinical psychologists whose work was evaluated in the Centre for Mental health report are attending, as well as clinical psychologists from the Primary Care Mental Health team in Islington.

The Nation chairs, Branch chairs and Faculty chairs have been contacted about this work and I am keen to hear from more Clinical Psychologists who might be interested in being involved in this project.

I will be having conversations with some of the psychologists from the 12 new community mental health pilot sites. It would be helpful to have a range of clinical psychologists across the UK and experts by experience involved.

I am working with the DCP, the NHS Confederation and the Centre for Mental Health to jointly put on a series of 1 hour webinars for GPs, Psychologists and Commissioners to promote clinical psychologists working in primary care, based on the evaluation carried out by the Centre for Mental Health.

I have been working with Andrew Baldwin from the BPS, Lawrence Moulin, Annette Schlosser, Suzanne Heywood-Everett and Laura Fisk on this work.

We are delighted that the Chair of the NHS confederation’s clinical commissioning committee, Dr. Phil Moore, who is a

GP is now involved. We plan to have the first webinar in April and will start promoting it once we have confirmed the date.

‘Primary Care Clinical Psychology: Creating opportunities for Innovative developments to meet the needs of GPs and their patients’

Two Clinical Psychologists Suzanne Heywood-Everett and Cathy Byard will showcase their services in Bradford and Catterick that were evaluated by the Centre for Mental Health, demonstrating the value that Clinical Psychologists can bring and showing how primary care can provide opportunities for innovation.

Do come along!

This webinar looked at new ways to support people with physical and mental health needs in primary care, leading to improved patient outcomes, creation of savings and reduced stress for clinicians.

You can view a recording of the webinar, an animation that was shown at the event and get a patient's perspective by visiting the NHS Confederation website.

The last 20 years has seen the role of clinical psychologists in the NHS diversify from expert therapist to consultancy and service development, linked to the ‘new ways of working’ initiative led by the DCP.

In many ways, it feels as if we are entering a similar phase of development in which clinical psychologists review and expand on our roles, and again there is a need for the DCP to take a lead on this.

At the 2018 DCP conference a nominal group exercise generated a number of ideas about expanding the roles that clinical psychologists occupy, working in different settings (e.g. primary care, community bases), with new responsibilities (e.g. non-medical responsible clinician) and new aims (e.g. preventing hospital admissions, influencing local and national policy).

What also became apparent is that many psychologists are already in such roles.

Currently, however, there has been no systematic investigation of these roles and the services they have developed, or how effective they are in helping the public.

This project aims to fill this gap by scoping out new developments in the roles played by clinical psychologists, and assessing their impact.

Understanding Depression follows on from Understanding Psychosis in increasing the public’s awareness of psychological approaches to mental health difficulties.

It highlights the social factors that can cause and maintain depression and looks at social conditions likely to reduce or prevent it.

Understanding Depression has been published and is available to read on the BPS website.

The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence (APPG for PDD) is a cross-party parliamentary group dedicated to persuading government, government departments and relevant public and medical bodies to reduce the individual and social harms associated with the injudicious and overuse of prescribed psychoactive medications (e.g. antidepressants. benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, stimulants and painkillers).

There is growing evidence that long-term use of psychiatric and other medications has worse outcomes. Individual and social harms range from mild to moderate distress, to cognitive impairment, loss of functioning, suicidal ideation and suicide.