Psychology Services: Women’s Secure Service
The information on this page is copied from the Psychology Services Women’s Secure Service information leaflet. The leaflet is given to people who use this service.
What is Psychology?
Psychology helps people understand their own behaviour, how they feel, think, desire, and what they believe. It aims to help people who have mental health difficulties using assessments and treatments. During assessments, we sit together and talk about things that happened to you before you came here. We may also do some questionnaires together. Psychological therapy is a talking therapy and does not involve medication. Therefore, we do psychological therapy together, not instead of, medical treatment.
Why do I need psychology?
The main aim of psychological treatment is to help you reduce your risks. For example, together we will try to understand why you are in secure services, work on developing new skills, or adapt skills that you already have. Engagement with psychology is part of your overall treatment while you are in hospital.
How will we work together?
In the first few weeks from admission, we will start doing some questionnaires and talk a bit more in depth about how we will be working together. By the end of this period, we should be able to agree partly or completely about what leads to your risks and offending, and what prevents you from going in the direction you would want in life (we call this psychological formulation). After this, we will discuss a pathway of psychological treatments.
What assessments will we do together?
Together, we will complete an HCR-20 assessment (Historical, Clinical Risk Management) which helps in understanding the risk of violent behaviour before your first CPA meeting (Care Programme Approach).
We also identify psychological strengths and weaknesses using different questionnaires or assessments. For instance, a cognitive assessment can help you and us to understand the best way to communicate, learn new skills, and function in everyday life.
Some assessments are personalised and will depend on your individual needs. We will go through this more in detail when we meet face-to-face.
What treatments will we do together?
We offer two types of interventions:
- Psychological treatment offered to every service user,
- Psychological treatment according to your individual needs.
Psychological treatments for everyone
You will work with the psychology team to develop a formulation of your psychological needs, which is a simple to read document, which explains how we and the rest of the team can understand you better.
You will also participate in making a Positive Behavioural Support Plan, which aims to understand how we can prevent challenging behaviours from happening and reduce restrictive practices.
We run a number of psychoeducational group sessions (for example, the “Hearing Voices” group), where we learn about psychological problems and ways to overcome them.
Psychological treatment according to your individual needs
Individual therapy is provided, when it is appropriate. These therapies are limited in time and target specific needs.
What else do we do
We help the whole team understand your specific psychological needs and ways to support you with them even when we are not on the ward.
We participate in your weekly clinical review and your CPA meetings.
We meet regularly with the ward team to help them understand you and to reflect on our practice together.
We might help staff understand specific issues when it is needed, for example by doing training sessions like Autism Awareness.
Customer Services
Our Customer Services team provide confidential advice, information and support, helping you to answer any questions you have about our services or about any health matters.
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Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust values and celebrates the diversity of all the communities we serve. We are fully committed to ensuring that all people have equality of opportunity to access our service, irrespective of their age, gender, ethnicity, race, disability, religion or belief, sexual orientation, marital or civil partnership or social and economic status.