Our Director of Nursing, David Wilmott chaired the webinar and handed over to Dr Nikhil Khisty, the Medical Director for Cygnet Hospital Bury who was our first presenter. Dr Khisty’s presentation titled “Summary of Safeguarding in the Personality Disorder Services” provided an introduction to Cygnet Hospital Bury and some background information and context for safeguarding incidents that occurred in 2020.
This was followed by Victor Takadiwa, our Hospital Director at Bury who ran through the valuable lessons learnt from the incidents. He touched on key areas of learning such as staff training, recruitment, team structure and spoke about the importance of ensuring a strong skill mix on the ward. This was all underpinned with the importance of good multi agency working.
We then had a presentation from Dr Sharon Prince and Dr Joanne Ramsden, the editors of ‘Working Effectively with “Personality Disorder”: Contemporary and Critical Perspectives on Clinical and Organisational Practice’. Their presentation gave a brief overview of some of the themes in their book, such as challenging the title of ‘personality disorder’ and what that really means for those with the diagnosis, as well as emphasising the importance of learning from and working together with the service users in our care.
To start the afternoon session Dr Chris Irons, Clinical Psychologist and Director for Balanced Minds, presented his slides ‘How ideas from Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) can be used as a powerful way of understanding difficulties, distress and problems in a team and organisational context’. He provided a great insight into how giving and receiving compassion can affect us all and how we can learn to be better at this both for ourselves and the individuals in our care. The Q&A that followed also lead to discussions about how we can find the balance between our ‘drive system’ and ‘soothing system’ to promote a happy and motivated team.
Dr Rachel Worthington, our Chair of the Cygnet Personality Disorder Steering Group and Head of Psychology at Cygnet Hospital Bury, then presented and shared our Model of Care for our Personality Disorder Services. She spoke about how the model was created and implemented and an example of how this works in practise. We heard from a service user directly about the positive impact this has had for him.
Our final presentation of the day titled ‘A Multidisciplinary Approach to Referrals’, was delivered by Dr Deepu Thomas, Lead Psychiatrist. It detailed our process of taking referrals, he discussed the potential barriers and difficulties faced and the most common reasons for possible delays.
It was a fantastic webinar and we would like to thank all of our speakers and organisers for supporting the event. Keep an eye on our Events page or sign up to our Mailing List to make sure you hear about our next webinars.