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A major difficulty identified many years ago in psychiatric care is the shortage of appropriate instruments with which to carry out valid and reliable therapeutic assessments which are behaviourally based and therefore appropriate for use in a variety of contexts. The aim of this project was to ascertain the utility of a forensic nursing risk assessment tool - Behavioural Status Index (BEST-Index). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A multi-site cross-sectional survey was undertaken using mixed method design. Quantitative data was generated using BEST-Index to allow comparisons across three different levels of security (high, medium and low) in Scotland and Ireland. Qualitative data were gathered from patients and multi-disciplinary team (MDT) members using semi-structured interviews and questionnaire.

Measured over an 18-month period, there was a statistically significant improvement in behaviour, when comparing patients in high and medium secure hospitals. Two key themes emerged from patient and staff perspectives: “acceptance of the process” and “production and delivery of information”, respectively. The wider MDT acknowledge the value of nursing risk assessment, but require adequate information to enable them to interpret findings. Collaborating with patients to undertake risk assessments can enhance future care planning.

Studies using cross-section can only provide information at fixed points in time.

The BEST-Index assessment tool is well established in clinical practice and has demonstrated good utility.

This project has served to highlight the unique contribution of BEST-Index to both staff and patients alike and confirm its robustness and versatility across differing levels of security in Scottish and Irish forensic mental health services.

Incidents of violence and aggression are a regular occurrence within adult forensic mental health inpatient settings and often lead to the use of restrictive practices such as seclusion. Such events are frequently attributed to the complexity of the patients. Research commonly focuses on patient’s characteristics and their association with seclusion use. Less attention has been centred on forensic mental health nurses’ attitudes to seclusion and the association of nursing staff characteristics.

A cross-sectional survey was undertaken using a standardised questionnaire, “Survey of Nurses’ Attitudes to Seclusion”. Responses were received from n = 147 nurses at a high secure forensic mental health hospital in the UK.

Key findings indicate that most participants believed seclusion should remain part of clinical practice. A correlation was identified between forensic mental health nurses’ attitudes to seclusion use and their characteristics: gender, age range, educational level and experience.

This paper presents novel information on seclusion reduction opportunities through modifiable workforce factors such as gender-sensitive rostering and staff training and development. Furthermore, recruitment and retention strategies should be prioritised so forensic mental health is perceived as an attractive career and a safe workplace.

The paucity of research in this area has prompted calls for further research to explore nursing staff characteristics and seclusion use. This is particularly important now due to the current global difficulty in the recruitment and retention of mental health nurses.

Reports on quality of life (QOL) measures for forensic patients are severely limited. The present paper aims to consider how to assess chronic patient's well‐being and to identify and evaluate the content validity of measures used to assess health‐related QOL in psychosis.

A review was undertaken to gather information on the different QOL measures from relevant databases, exploring their strengths and weaknesses.

Results from the review indicate a broad range of assessment tools are used in practice, although very few have been used in forensic settings. A preference for subjective tools is emerging, in addition to patient rated scales as opposed to clinician rated scales.

The application of QOL measures in the forensic population is of particular interest and a relatively new area of study, thus of value to practicing clinicians. It is hoped that the use of appropriate tools will enhance understanding of the treatment and service needs for mentally disordered offenders.

Although intellectual disability (ID) and criminal offending have long been associated, the nature of this link is obfuscated by reliance on historically unrigorous means of assessing ID and fractionating social cognitive skills. The purpose of this paper is to review and report current findings and set an agenda for future research in social perception, social inference and social problem solving in ID violent offenders.

The literature is reviewed on comorbidity of criminal offending and ID, and on social cognitive impairment and ID offending. In an exploratory case-control series comprising six violent offenders with ID and five similarly able controls, emotion recognition and social inference are assessed by the Awareness of Social Inference Test and social problem-solving ability and style by an adapted Social Problem-Solving Inventory.

Violent offenders recognised all emotions except “anxious”. Further, while offenders could interpret and integrate wider contextual cues, absent such cues offenders were less able to use paralinguistic cues (e.g. emotional tone) to infer speakers’ feelings. Offenders in this sample exceeded controls’ social problem-solving scores.

This paper confirms that ID offenders, like neurotypical offenders, display specific deficits in emotion recognition – particularly fear recognition – but suggests that in ID offenders impairments of affect perception are not necessarily accompanied by impaired social problem solving. The implication for therapeutic practice is that ID offenders might be most effectively rehabilitated by targeting simpler, low-level cognitive processes, such as fear perception, rather than adapting treatment strategies from mainstream offenders.

Research to date has identified young people's perspectives on a number of health‐related topics such as smoking, alcohol, sexual health, physical activity and healthy eating. Whilst this body of research draws important attention towards young people's views on topical health concerns, it arguably remains located within a pre‐defined agenda; thereby marginalising young people's own, and potentially different, frames of reference when discussing health. In light of this omission, the aim of this paper is to examine young people's own understandings of health in line with their own frames of reference.

Data were collected from 55 young people aged 15‐16 years through group discussions, individual interviews and observational data in a school and surrounding community settings. Key themes were analysed for their implications for “emic” conceptualisations of health. Young people's perspectives were further compared with accounts given by professionals.

Two key themes emerged from young people's accounts: being happy and having fun. Young people's meanings of being happy highlighted the relational components of developing a positive self‐belief, pointing to a number of socially located prerequisites for promoting their health. Discussions of having fun were understood as potentially liberating, resistive and subversive, but which exist in some tension with adults’ discourses of risk and risk‐taking.

Examining young people's accounts points to the possibility of a more positive discourse on health – opening up new opportunities and insights for health promotion informed by concepts of empowerment.

This chapter examines the inauguration of the university study of Education in Scotland and its relation to teacher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The chapter outlines moves to establish Education as a disciplinary field in higher education and the junctures at which this movement aligns with and is in tension with concurrent moves to advance teaching as a profession. Academisation and professionalisation are the twin poles of this debate. This is not a parochial or obsolete debate. The place of teacher preparation in higher education has been the focus of sustained discussion across Anglophone nations. Three examples – the inauguration of chairs and lectureships, the governance of teacher education and deliberation on the content and purpose of a degree in Education – are used to help explain the apparent paradox between the historic place of education in Scottish culture and identity and the relatively recent full involvement of Scotland's universities in the professional preparation of teachers. Investigating the activities of the first academic community of educationists in Scotland may help to understand continuing struggles over jurisdiction and authority in this contested and yet neglected field.