Exploring the potential for joint training between legal professionals in the criminal justice system and health and social care professionals in the mental-health services.

Effective screening of mentally-ill defendants in the criminal court system requires cooperation between legal professionals in the criminal justice system (CJS), and health and social care workers in the mental-health service (MHS). This interagency working, though, can be problematic, as recognized in the Bradley inquiry that recommended joint training for MHS and CJS professionals. The aim of this study was to examine the experiences and attitudes of workers in the CJS and MHS to inform the development of relevant training.

A women's worker in court: a more appropriate service for women defendants with mental health issues?

Aims: Court liaison services aim to reduce mental illness in prison through early treatment and/or diversion into care of defendants negotiating their court proceedings. However, liaison services may inadvertently contribute to gender inequalities in mental health in the prison system because women often do not access liaison services. This is attributed to services failing to recognize that women have different needs from men.

Challenges at the interface of working between mental health services and the criminal justice system.

Provision of mental health reports for defendants in contact with the criminal justice system is problematic. This paper explores factors that facilitate the flow of information on a defendant between the courts and the mental health services. It identifies key challenges to this information transfer from a court worker's perspective.

Clinical decision-making and the nurse consultant role.

This paper reviews the requirement for expert clinical decision-making in the role of nurse consultants. The aim is to gain a better understanding of this role by exploring the experiences and views of consultant practitioners. This is a summary of the paper: the full version can be accessed at nursingtimes.

Nurse-led inpatient care: opening the 'black box'.

With recent evaluations contradicting early reports of improved outcomes from nurse-led inpatient care, the 'black box' of nurse-led care must be opened in order to examine the model of treatment. We present findings on the processes of care in one nurse-led unit (NLU), compared with an acute ward. Patterns and quality of nursing care were quantified using bar-code technology to measure type, frequency and duration of nursing activities and Quality Patient Care Scale to measure the quality of care.