Nursing In‐Patients with Personality Disorder: a Schema‐Focused Approach

Abstract

Research suggests that the majority of forensic clients have significant personality difficulties. Providing quality nursing care to this client group is identified as particularly difficult. This paper outlines how schema‐focused therapy has been introduced to nursing staff working with personality disordered clients in an in‐patient setting in order to enhance their practice with this client group. A brief overview is given of Young's (1994) schema‐focused therapy model and a detailed description of how this model has been incorporated into in‐house training and used to guide nursing treatment plans and individual nursing interventions. Although this strategy has not been formally evaluated, feedback suggests that both staff and patients believe that the quality of care provided since its introduction has improved significantly.

Implementation of a schema therapy awareness group for adult male low secure patients with comorbid personality difficulties: reflections and challenges

“…Additional studies support these findings with regard to the effectiveness of ST within outpatient settings (Nordahl and Nysaeter, 2005;Sempé rtegui et al, 2013) and mediumsecure settings (Murphy and McVey, 2001), demonstrating significant improvements in quality of life (Jacob and Arntz, 2013) as well as a reduced frequency and duration of therapy (Nadort et al, 2009).…”