New Academic Centre Launched
Offenders increasingly present mental health problems accompanied with violent and complex behaviour requiring specialist treatment and rehabilitation. This is driving the need for more specialist research and training to intervene with this trend and successfully rehabilitate prisoners.
Speaking at the launch of the new academic centre, Chief Executive, Dr Philip Sugarman, and Professor of Forensic Mental Health at the IoP, Prof Tom Fahy recognised that more prisoners than ever are requiring specialist mental health care. A report conducted by the Sainsbury’s Centre for Mental Health identified that the forensic services population rose by 45% between 1996 and 2006, with ‘lack of bed availability’ identified as the most common reason for a delay in referral.
“Increasingly offenders present mental health problems accompanied with violent and complex behaviour requiring specialist treatment and rehabilitation. There is a clear need for more specialist research and teaching as well as training more forensic psychiatrists to intervene with this emerging trend and rehabilitate prisoners back into the community where possible” commented Prof Fahy. “That is why our collaboration to launch the academic centre here at St Andrew’s Healthcare is so crucial to developing future treatments and interventions for secure services.
The centre is based on the Northampton site which is the ideal environment given the large sample of secure patients available. The team will establish a s group of high calibre practitioners and post graduate student to carry out specialist mental health research and teaching, with the specific aim of giving a much needed boost to forensic services in the UK. The collaboration will produce twelve research papers and a Professor over the first five years.
“St Andrews Academic Centre in Northampton will see the forming of a partnership between two prestigious organisations,” assed Dr Sugarman. “We are dedicated to becoming a national teaching hospital, and the establishment of this centre will allow us to provide ground-breaking research which will be of great importance to our service users in this sector. The development pf specialist secure services is a priority for our charity and we are keen to see research focus on special groups such as adolescents, older adults, brain injury, learning disability and gender-specific services.”