Dear colleagues,
We are clinical psychologists who work in a large community service for
people with learning disabilities. Our service been receiving an increasing
number of referrals for assessment of alleged offenders with learning
disabilities. In order to develop a uniform practice across the service, we
would be very interested to hear about the experiences in this area of other
clinical psychologists who work in community LD services.
Please could you take a moment to respond to the questions below? Please
feel free to send a partial response if you think we are asking too many
questions! If we receive a reasonable number of responses we will aim to
collate and disseminate the information.
We are sending out this mail via more than one mailing list, so please
excuse us if you have already received it.
Please respond to: [log in to unmask]
With best wishes,
Paul Willner, Philippa Payne-O'Donnell and Mark Smith
- Where do you work?
- How frequently does your team receive requests for assessments of alleged
offenders' fitness to plead?
- What proportion (roughly) of these requests relate to people who are not
already known to the community team?
- How do these requests reach you? Who initiates the referral (police?
solicitor?) and who is the referrer (eg. care manager)?
- How do you respond? If you accept the referral, do you work to the
referrer's time-scale? Does your service have a policy?
- Do you also receive requests for assessment of capacity to be interviewed
under caution? How do these requests reach you and how do you respond to
them?
- Is your impression that your pattern of referrals in this area has changed
in recent years?
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