Practitioners’ Perceptions and Experiences of a Brief Joint Working Intervention Within the Offender Personality Disorder Community Pathway

This qualitative study explores practitioners’ perceptions and experiences of a brief joint working intervention within the Offender Personality Disorder community pathway. Ten practitioners were recruited through purposive sampling and took part in online semi-structured interviews, which were analyzed using thematic analysis. Themes suggested that joint working helped probation practitioners to better understand the people they supervised and to develop new ways of working. Collaboration, responsive working, established relationships, and active engagement were highlighted as good practices. Challenges included power dynamics, probation practitioners’ fear and cynicism, limited timeframes, and external pressures. The study highlights the benefits of a relational approach to joint working and makes practice recommendations. This study was conducted by the Research Involving Service Users Excels (RISE) team. RISE was made up of people with lived experience of prison, probation, and forensic mental health systems, alongside National Health Service and probation employees.