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Current national policies present a challenge to the existing mental health workforce as most staff have not been trained to work with people within the context of their social support network. This paper presents two complementary training initiatives designed to enable mental health staff to meet the range of needs of families: (1) an in‐house accredited (one‐year) course that has enabled the successful creation of specialist family intervention in psychosis teams; and (2) a whole‐team trust‐wide training programme (three‐day course) to promote partnership working with families by both community and inpatient teams. Issues that have enabled the successful translation of training to practice are considered.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the long-term outcomes for 15 young people on a range of indicators including school success, involvement with other agencies and the perceived effectiveness by the family.

Semi-structured telephone interviews were used to gather a range of both quantitative and qualitative data. Interviews were with a parent of the referred child (n=15).

In all, 87 per cent of care-givers interviewed rated the service they had received as helpful 85 per cent reported these changes to be maintained at the three year follow-up. Rate of school exclusion was only 7 per cent and 0 per cent of families went on to have involvement with statutory social services or the youth justice system.

This is a small-scale study offering a small sample (n=15) of families previously referred to this Family Intervention Team, at a three-year post-intervention period. More routine longitudinal information needs to be gathered for a more robust indication on long-term outcomes.

The impact this study will have on the team involved will be in its recommendations for further long-term outcome studies; but also in feeding back to the service the significant key messages from those interviewed.

Contributing to a wider understanding of the long-term benefits of early intervention.

This paper offers some new though small statistical data in the growing pool of statistics that are indicating positive outcomes for early intervention and family intervention projects.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss both the early implementation of a US mental health intervention for young children in the context of its introduction to a pilot site in a London borough and the progress made in establishing a randomised controlled trial (RCT).

This paper describes an evaluation of a new intervention and the learning that followed in terms of its implementation and future evaluation. Qualitative data were collected from a range of stakeholders and practitioners through interviews and small group discussions. These interviews focussed on both of these issues, with particular reference to the proposal to conduct an RCT.

The findings of this evaluation add to the evidence on how best to support new initiatives that have been introduced from other settings and countries to embed in a receiving site and the optimal timing and feasibility of conducting an RCT. At the end of the feasibility study, which took place within the year of the service being introduced and which was only open to clients for six months of this year the conclusion was that an RCT at that point was neither possible nor desirable. Over the following years, the commitment of the judiciary to examine if there was a way to make an RCT study in respect of this intervention meant that a template was established that may well have broader application.

At a time when there is an increasing demand for evidence on effective interventions this paper makes a valuable contribution to the development of RCTs in general and specifically in the family court arena. It also recommends that attention must also be paid to the time, which is needed to implement and establish interventions and then to test them.

This paper highlights the need to establish realistic timescales not only around the implementation of initiatives but also for their evaluation.

This study breaks new ground in considering implementation challenges in the court and children’s services’ context. It brings to the fore the important role of the judiciary in approving new processes.

This paper is concerned with what intensive family intervention professionals reveal to the parents with whom they work about whether they themselves are parents or not, as a form of professional self-disclosure in child welfare work. This paper also addresses the act of lying in professional self-disclosure.

The paper draws on material from a series of narrative interviews completed with practitioners from one family intervention programme in an English local authority as part of a study looking at how children’s services professionals experience the suffering of parents. The study was based on a psychoanalytically informed methodological approach, which is represented in the analysis provided in the paper.

The overall team ethos regarding parental status disclosure is considered briefly first then two participants’ accounts are explored in depth. These involved, what can be considered as, questionable or unorthodox stances regarding parental status disclosure (and self-disclosure more generally). The exploration illustrates the role that practitioners’ personal lives and histories can play in influencing how the act of professional parental status disclosure is experienced and how particular positions are invested in regarding the role of self-disclosure in working relationships with parents.

Child welfare and family intervention professionals are often asked personal questions by the parents and carers they work with, including questions about whether they are a parent or not. These questions can be difficult to answer and there is a need for dedicated empirical analysis into the ways in which professionals experience, think about and respond to them and what they disclose about themselves when working with families.

Mental health service improvement initiatives often involve the setting of targets and monitoring of performance. The purpose of this paper is to describe the application of appreciative enquiry (AE), a radically different but complementary approach to quality assurance and improvement, to specialist mental health services across a health region.

This case study describes a regional quality improvement (QI) project involving 12 early intervention in psychosis (EIP) services in South West England. In total, 40 people were trained in AE interviewing skills and in non-reciprocal peer review visits 59 interviews were conducted involving 103 interviewees including service users, carers, clinicians, managers and commissioners. Immediate verbal feedback was provided and main themes summarised in individual reports to host teams using the following headings: team values, strengths, dreams and development plans. A thematic analysis was conducted on team reports and a project report produced which summarised the stages and results of this regional initiative.

All participants rated the experience as positive; it enhanced staff motivation and led to service development and improvement.

The experiences of these 12 EIP teams may not necessarily be generalisable to other services/regions but this positive approach to service improvement could be widely applied.

AE is applicable in large-scale QI initiatives.

To the authors knowledge this is the first time that AE has been applied to large-scale mental health service improvement and innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to describe family intervention (FI) with four families in which the service user is under the care of forensic mental health services. There is a focus on identifying how systemic practice is used or adapted in working with families who have a family member who has presented risk and caused harm.

Four case studies are used to provide a basis for the exploration of commonalities in practice between the cases and the utility of FI within forensic services, which have the dual purpose of promoting mental health recovery and reducing offending/risk behaviour.

Family work can be a key healing tool in the recovery journey of forensic service users and their families. An integrated systemic and psycho-educational FI approach was found to be appropriate in the cases described. Issues particular to forensic services are identified; these include the role of safety planning; the function of talking about the history of trauma in the family including the impact of offending behaviour; mediating difficult relationships between family members and professionals; and overcoming barriers to having difficult and emotive conversations.

The absence of outcome assessments limits the findings to observational data and self-reported experiences from the authors.

FI can be safely and effectively used within forensic settings, facilitated by practitioners competent in working with trauma and complexity, as an integrated component of the therapeutic treatment.

There are recognised barriers to the provision of FI within forensic settings, with limited research regarding the application of such therapies with forensic patients and their families. This paper adds to the small pool of knowledge regarding useful applications of FI in such settings.

The purpose of this paper is to disseminate street gang research by Hesketh (2018) that has identified a major aspect of young disenfranchised people’s attraction to street gangs as edgework risk-taking. The study which sought to identify differences between those who joined street gangs compared to those who abstained on Merseyside.

Two samples were taken from locations within the five boroughs of Merseyside, the first comprising of 22 participants (18–25) involved in street gangs as active and ex-members with a second sample consisting of 22 participants (18–25) who had completely abstained from street gang membership. Data were collected through adoption of biographic narrative interpretive method (BNIM) (Wengraf, 2001), with analysis taking the form of Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) version of grounded theory.

Of the many findings that surrounded what was identified as the core category/central phenomena of “coping with limited opportunity” it emerged that marginalisation and austerity were contributing to increasing inequality and institutional constraint on young people on Merseyside. As a result, many of the 18–25 year young men felt powerless, lacking identity and aspirational drive. Joining a gang thus became not only a way in which control was seized back from such constraint through criminal risk-taking behaviour, what Lyng (1990) has termed “edgework”, but also a means in which many of the young men interviewed gained an identity of being “bad” from which intrinsically pleasurable seductive and criminally erotic sensations were derived (Katz, 1988). Moreover, a relatively new version of edgework was also identified, even though by way of male testimony. Called “vicarious edgework”, the phenomena sees young women drawn to male gang members (“bad boys”) to derive the excitement of risk indirectly while remaining law abiding. In sum, the paper highlights a concerning socio-psychological and key motivating driver triggered by marginalisation.

Study samples were all male. Thus, any observations on the vicarious edgework aspect of risk taking requires further research involving both young men and women.

The paper highlights the need for more understanding of the allure of risk-taking. The paper identifies a new form of female edgework. The paper draws attention to gang membership and non-membership on Merseyside, an area that has been greatly neglected by gangs’ studies in the UK. The paper describes a novel way of data collection using an adoption of BNIM.

In sum, the paper highlights a concerning socio-psychological and key motivating driver triggered by marginalisation. This, the author contends has been largely neglected by risk factor focussed interventions that largely concentrate on the idea of rational choice theory and sociological positivism.

The paper attempts to disseminate original street gang research by Hesketh (2018) that has identified a major aspect of young disenfranchised people’s attraction to street gangs as edgework risk-taking.