Four members of the Beckton DBT team attended the conference, held at the NCVO centre in Kings Cross, to learn more about the current and future direction of DBT. The team members who attended were Dawn Miller (DBT Clinical Specialist/CBT Therapist), Olga Konstantinidou (Highly Specialised Clinical Psychologist & DBT Lead), Viviana Meloni (Chartered Practitioner Psychologist) and Elizabeth Tuudah (Assistant Psychologist).
The morning started with presentations from keynote speakers in the world of DBT promoting their own work and exploring the difficulties that are faced by DBT teams and how these can be overcome. It was very validating to hear similar struggles form other teams and to learn how these can be overcome.
The team were then able to attend a number of parallel presentations, including one by Dawn Miller, Beckton’s DBT Clinical Specialist. Dawn had been selected to provide a presentation on the Beckton Adherent DBT programme ‘Quality Matters: Inpatient Tier 4 Personality Disorder Service – DBT Programme Outcomes’.
This presentation highlighted the positive changes that have been noted on the Patient Rated Outcome Measures (PROMs). It demonstrated a reduction in the experience of anger and its adaptive management and highlighted consistent increases in self-esteem. Additionally, the PROMs showed an increase across the five core facets of mindfulness and decrease in emotion regulation difficulties. Further to this Dawn’s presentation demonstrated an 80% completion rate for service users starting the programme, which is no mean feat on an inpatient service!
In line with this Beckton’s service recorded data highlights a 67% reduction in significant parasuicidal behaviours, 56% of service users on the DBT programme becoming informal and 93% being discharged to a lower level of security. Possibly more importantly qualitative feedback from service users has demonstrated the significant benefits and changes they have derived from the programme.
All of the data taken together; outcome measures, service data and service user feedback highlights that the hard work to develop and maintain the DBT programme at Beckton has been worth it. It shows that it really does help the service users build ‘A Life Worth Living’ – the key target in DBT.
The team, led by Elizabeth Tuudah (Assistant Psychologist) and Olga Konstantinidou (Highly Specialised Clinical Psychologist & DBT Lead) also had an exciting opportunity to present a poster illustrating Beckton’s Adapted DBT programme. This has been developed to increase access to DBT for those with a learning disability. This demonstrated not only the changes made to adapt some of the core DBT skills but also the adaptations in how the information is presented and the considerations that have been given to how the programme is delivered to aid processing, retention and recall of information. There was a real buzz around the poster during the lunch break with people interested to find out what changes the team had made and their experience of this.
The team were very proud to represent Cygnet Hospital Beckton and to network with others delivering DBT in order to share information and knowledge. The team left feeling very excited about the information they could bring back to the rest of the team and enthusiastic to further develop the DBT programme at Cygnet Hospital Beckton.