New risk-assessment approach could help protect community
December 2006A new study by Drs Mike Doyle and Mairead Dolan of the Division of Psychiatry has outlined new measures to predict whether a person discharged from mental health services is likely to act violently in the community.
The research, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, demonstrates that using measures of psychopathy, impulsiveness and anger as well as historical measures of risk improves predictive accuracy.
Mike said: ‘In the last 20 years there have been significant developments in the assessment of violence risk and management, but there are relatively few studies that have tested using a combination of clinical and statistical approaches to risk assessment.”
112 patients discharged from in-patient care in the North West were assessed pre-discharge and followed up 24 weeks after. The pre-discharge measures were compared with any subsequent occurrence of violent behaviour to assess the predictive validity of the risk factors used.
“The study showed that relying on official records alone would have detected only half of the incidents that occurred,” Mike concluded. “Including information supplied by people who knew the individuals significantly improved the detection of violence.”
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