Integrating static and modifiable risk factors in violence risk assessment for forensic psychiatric patients: a feasibility study of FoVOx.

Introduction: Risk assessment is integral to forensic psychiatry. Previous work has highlighted the benefits of using scalable and evidence-based actuarial risk tools developed within forensic populations, such as the online Forensic Psychiatry and Violence Oxford (FoVOx) violence risk assessment tool. We examined the feasibility of using FoVOx in a Swedish forensic cohort and tested whether adding modifiable (dynamic) factors would increase its useability to clinicians.

Assessment of violence risk in 440 psychiatric patients in China: examining the feasibility and acceptability of a novel and scalable approach (FoVOx).

Background: Violence risk assessment is a routine part of clinical services in mental health, and in particular secure psychiatric hospitals. The use of prediction models and risk tools can assist clinical decision-making on risk management, including decisions about further assessments, referral, hospitalization and treatment. In recent years, scalable evidence-based tools, such as Forensic Psychiatry and Violent Oxford (FoVOx), have been developed and validated for patients with mental illness.

A Clinical Feasibility Study of the Forensic Psychiatry and Violence Oxford (FoVOx) Tool.

Risk assessment informs decisions around admission to and discharge from secure psychiatric hospital and contributes to treatment and supervision. There are advantages to using brief, scalable, free online tools with similar accuracy to instruments currently used. We undertook a study of one such risk assessment, the Forensic Psychiatry and Violence Oxford (FoVOx) tool, examining its acceptability, feasibility, and practicality.

The Costs of Healthcare in Prison and Custody: Systematic Review of Current Estimates and Proposed Guidelines for Future Reporting.

We aimed to review prison healthcare expenditure internationally. To systematically review healthcare spending on prisoners worldwide, examine comparability between countries, and develop guidelines to improve reporting. Five bibliographic indexes (International Monetary Fund, ProQuest: Statistical Abstracts of the World, PubMed, Google Scholar, and JSTOR) were searched for the costs of prison and prison healthcare, supplemented with country-specific searches for the 20 countries with the highest prison populations.

Web-Based Violence Risk Monitoring Tool in Psychoses: Pilot Study in Community Forensic Patients.

We describe the development and pilot testing of a novel, web-based, violence risk monitoring instrument for use in community patients with psychoses. We describe the development of the tool, including drawing on systematic reviews of the field, how item content was operationalized, the development of a user interface, and its subsequent piloting. Sixty-eight patients were included from three English counties, who had been discharged from forensic psychiatric services.

How cannabis causes paranoia: using the intravenous administration of ∆9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to identify key cognitive mechanisms leading to paranoia.

Paranoia is receiving increasing attention in its own right, since it is a central experience of psychotic disorders and a marker of the health of a society. Paranoia is associated with use of the most commonly taken illicit drug, cannabis. The objective was to determine whether the principal psychoactive ingredient of cannabis-∆(9)-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)-causes paranoia and to use the drug as a probe to identify key cognitive mechanisms underlying paranoia.