Access to the women’s Offender Personality Disorder Pathway—making criteria more gender-responsive

Aisling O’Meara, Laura d’Cruz, Ruth Horry, Carine Lewis, Jason Davies

Introduction The Offender Personality Disorder (OPD) Pathway for England and Wales provides specialist services to men and women with complex mental health needs, which are linked to serious and harmful offending. However, criteria for accessing such services have relied on practitioner judgement and screening items developed for use with men. Within the context of a policy and practice task and finish group, this study examined existing processes and an array of routinely monitored items with the aim of developing a gender-responsive identification tool for women’s entry to the OPD Pathway that would withstand the test of time. Method A two-part exploratory study of cross-sectional secondary data drawn from a Ministry of Justice database of all women on licence or in custody at the time of access (June 2019) was conducted. Binary logistic regression modelling of extant identification processes was carried out. Proposed alternative items indicating key characteristics that may more appropriately represent the psychological needs profiles of women on the OPD Pathway were modelled and consulted on. Results A tool consisting of 16 items that demonstrated good predictive utility in screening outcome was established. This practical and automatable tool was rolled out for use across probation and prison services. Conclusion This revised screening tool appeared more gender-sensitive than previous approaches to identifying women for OPD involvement while approximately maintaining the female OPD caseload figures.