Meeting-The-Challenge-Making-a-Difference-Practitioner-Guide
Meeting-The-Challenge-Making-a-Difference-Practitioner-Guide
Meeting-The-Challenge-Making-a-Difference-Practitioner-Guide
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“In this new team, we are<br />
very clear about our<br />
primary task, but we are<br />
really struggling because<br />
different team members<br />
take different<br />
approaches to this task<br />
– some workers<br />
approach the young<br />
people as if they cannot<br />
help themselves, and try<br />
to do everything for<br />
them, get involved in all<br />
aspects of their lives.<br />
Others take the view<br />
that the young people<br />
have to be helped to<br />
take responsibility for<br />
their situation. This<br />
difference is very<br />
confusing for the people<br />
who use our service, and<br />
it’s leading to a lot of<br />
conflict in the team.”<br />
Team Manager<br />
ARE YOU CLEAR ABOUT THE TASK OF YOUR<br />
ORGANISATION OR SERVICE? WOULD YOU BE ABLE<br />
TO COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES?<br />
• My service exists in order to ...<br />
• <strong>The</strong>re are services we don’t offer, like ...<br />
• <strong>The</strong>re are people whose problems fall outside our<br />
remit. This would include ...<br />
• A mistake that people commonly make is to think<br />
we do ...<br />
BUILDING A SHARED PICTURE<br />
Service users benefit if services have a clear and shared approach,<br />
an idea about how personality disorder develops, or how the<br />
personality of a human being becomes organised in ways that<br />
seem to be different from what is expected by the community<br />
they live in. In other words it helps if services have a ‘model of the<br />
human mind’.<br />
<strong>The</strong>re are a range of useful models of the development of<br />
personality disorder (see Chapter 3 How does personality<br />
disorder develop?). It will be important that the way the service<br />
thinks about personality disorder makes sense to the service user.<br />
While it helps to have a shared, coherent view of personality<br />
disorder, it can be unhelpful if this becomes fixed or rigid. If you are<br />
working with a model in your service which seems fixed, like a kind<br />
of ‘bible’, you probably need to think about why such certainty is<br />
necessary. Sometimes it is hoped that sticking rigidly to one point<br />
of view will give workers a sense of safety and security, but often it<br />
makes a service less safe, as it cannot respond flexibly to different<br />
individuals, situations or needs.<br />
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