The decisions made by Mental Health Professionals (MHPs) are of utmost significance for providing the highest quality care to service users. The assessment of risk is one of the pivotal processes that MHPs undertake frequently, as per government policy guidelines, and in order to safeguard patients and the public. Although Risk Assessment Proformas (RAPs) consume a proportion of MHP time and resources, very little research has been undertaken to address factors that might affect their most

more »

... al utilisation in practice. Previous literature suggests that medical decisions, like decision making of other kinds, is fraught with difficulty including being susceptible to the influence of cognitive biases, pre-decisional affect, overconfidence, and subjectively held attitudes towards organisational policies and regulations. Specifically, the presentation of risk information can influence decisions. It has also been suggested that anxiety has the capacity to elicit risk aversive responses, and that overconfidence and negative attitude may lead to complacency in undertaking policy-led responsibilities and produce non-compliance for the same. However, much of what is known about medical decision making has been gleaned from outside of context of mental health. As such, the current programme of research aimed to explore decision making in mental health settings and with a view to raise awareness of the complexity of decision making amongst MHPs. The implementation of quantitative and qualitative techniques (studies 1 and 2) revealed negative attitudes from psychiatrists towards Risk Assessment Proformas (RAPs), which are essentially structured decision making aids. Psychiatrist, compared to other MHPs, spent less time completing RAPs, which may reflect their differing attitudes towards their usefulness, something that was consistently emphasised during in-depth qualitative exploration. It was also found that experience was an additional differentiating factor between MHPs. Relationships between experience and other factor [...]