Research and analysis

National Evaluation of the Male OPD Pathway

An evaluation exploring the first 5 years of the whole system approach of the Joint NHS and HMPPS Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) Pathway.

Applies to England and Wales

Documents

Details

The aim of this evaluation was to look at the early evidence of the Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) Pathway; a jointly funded partnership between HMPPS and NHS England that provides a network of services for some of the most complex offenders with mental health problems.

The OPD Pathway is not one single behaviour programme, but a series of connected interventions and activities led by multi-disciplinary teams including psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, and trained operational justice staff. The aims of the OPD Pathway are to reduce risk, improve wellbeing, with a confident, competent workforce.

This is an independent national evaluation led by Bristol University to look at how the pathway was being experienced by staff and male offenders since its implementation. It attempted to statistically compare individuals referred to OPD Pathway services to those not. It was not intended to look at the effectiveness of the individual interventions that exist across the OPD Pathway.

There were 3 strands to this evaluation: a qualitative evaluation with staff, prisoners, and those under probation supervision to explore their understanding and experiences of the pathway; a quantitative evaluation utilising routinely collected data for men screening into the pathway; and an economic evaluation of the indicative cost-effectiveness of the pathway was conducted using decision modelling. The findings of this study are presented in the report.

The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and are not necessarily shared by the Ministry of Justice or NHS England (nor do they represent Government policy).

At the time of release, two additional reports were published on the OPD Pathway.

Evaluation of Psychologically Informed Planned Environments (PIPEs)

An Evaluation of Shared Reading in PIPEs

Published 13 October 2022