Pastoral Cymru Group, Specialist Mental Health Services

Pastoral Cymru is Wales's and South West England's leading independent provider of specialist mental health services. We provide low secure services for patients with complex mental health needs including mental illness, personality disorder and challenging behavior. Some of these patients may have borderline to mild intellectual disability, treatment resistance and significant offending behavior/history.

Our care pathway includes the full reintegration back to local services following a successful journey through our assessment, treatment, rehabilitation and 24 hour supported community living services.

Our twelve week assessment programme is led by Professor Nicola Gray. All patients receive an intensive multi-disciplinary assessment package, that focuses upon a range of structured professional judgements (SPJ's). The aim of the assessment process is that each patient's history, diagnoses and presenting risks are carefully evaluated and that a detailed clinical and risk formulation is produced, which then determines and directs intervention and risk management. The outcome of the risk assessment, risk formulation and risk management plan, alongside detailed multi-disciplinary care and treatment plans are presented at the patient's first Care Programme Approach (CPA) meeting.

These SPJ's include HCR-20 (violence risk), ROSP (suicide risk) and SVR-20 (sexual violence risk). We also routinely provide assessments using other standardised psychometric instruments (i.e. Psychopathy Checklist - Revised,  International Personality Disorder Examination) alongside evaluation of patients' cognitive and neuropsychological functioning (i.e. IQ, memory and executive function).

Our treatment models include a range of interventions including Dialectic Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Schema Therapy, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Mentalisation Based Treatment (MBT), in addition to individual and group based work. All assessments and treatments (interventions) are delivered by senior clinicians who are highly experienced in their administration.

Our outcomes are clearly demonstrable, being evaluated on measureable outcomes, in terms of average lengths of stay, improvements in quality of life, a reduction in behaviors that challenge (e.g. violent behavior, deliberate self harm) and increased level of therapeutic engagement over the course of the admission. The average for some commissioners is less than one year. To evidence these outcomes we have commissioned the services of Professor Robert Snowden, from Cardiff University who leads on our service evaluation.

Please download our brochure for further information.