Working with Personality Disorder: Extending Expertise and Enhancing Practice

The principal aim of the Personality Disorder Knowledge and Understanding Framework programme is to provide training that will lead to an improvement in service provision that will benefit service users. This is most directly achieved through practice-based training with skill-based learning outcomes. A programme that is largely practice-based ensures that learning will automatically be contextualised. The programme is designed to suit professionals in both forensic and non-forensic settings.

The final element of the KUF framework is the Masters’ programme which has been designed to meet the professional development needs of people already working in the field. It assumes a good working knowledge of personality disorder and aims to ‘develop expertise and enhance practice’.

The programme aims to do this by:

• providing experienced practitioners in the field of personality disorder with enhanced skills that will enable them to extend their practice and influence the development and delivery of services to benefit service users
• equipping managers, service leads and clinical specialists with the skills required to make them effective agents of constructive change in the services within which they work
• challenging stigma and negative attitudes to personality disorder through extending awareness and knowledge
• developing the theoretical knowledge and practical skills of workforce leaders in specialist areas such as research, leadership, teaching and consultation in the field of personality disorder
• providing an educational programme that yields identifiable "products" such as teaching presentations or research proposals, which are of potential benefit to the student and their employer
• promoting a model of work in the field of personality disorder that prioritises consideration of the experiences of service users
• demonstrating by example the potential contribution of service users to service planning, research, and teaching
• highlighting the interpersonal nature of working with personality disorder and the implications of this for all work in the field, and for staff at all levels within services
• providing an educational experience that recognises the challenges of adult learning, and the importance of the group and organisational context for learning
• promoting inter-disciplinary and inter-agency working, and recognition and respect for alternative perspectives both within the student group, and within work contexts
• providing students with the skills and support to undertake an empirical project that will extend the understanding of personality disorder or will potentially inform the delivery of services.

To register on this programme, please contact

Email: julie.lawson@nottshc.nhs.uk

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