Assessing the Quality of Service Provision for People with Challenging Needs Placed out of Borough

This paper describes the secondment of a health professional to the care management team to assess the efficacy and cost‐effectiveness of out‐of‐borough placements for individuals who present challenging behaviour. Lambeth Partnership agreed that dedicated psychologyl challenging needs time of a practitioner with more than 10 years' experience in the borough would be available to the care management team, creating collaborative working and enhancing the existing service. To assess the quality of services, a questionnaire was developed that covered demographics, types of service provision and intervention package employed (including monitoring and outcome measures), implementation of person centred‐planning (PCP) and the views of the key stakeholders. This paper summarises the findings of five months of assessing the quality of service provision for people with challenging needs placed out of the London Borough of Lambeth.