Amber understands the issues of risk, aggression and violence, and how these can be a source of great anxiety and concern for many organizations. Likewise the potential for serious disruption, staff injuries and sickness, burnout, and complaints and litigation from both service-users and staff members. Our consultancy team can help you safeguard against these problems by providing quality, legally-sound standards for developing comprehensive policy and safe practice.

The Senior Management Team at Amber provide consultancy to organizations as diverse as central government bodies, to national professional networks, from local authority policy underwriters to social and health care services in the public and independent sectors.

Some recent consultation projects have included:

• designing policies for physical intervention for psychiatric in-patient services, foster care agencies, learning disability services
• leading and chairing a national working party on aggression management in secure adolescent settings, looking at standards of practice across secure health, education, youth justice and social services for young people
• contributing to the National Institute for Mental Health in England’s (NIMHE) forthcoming guidance
• advising on specialist areas of practice with regards to conflict management (especially mental health and children’s services)
• setting up training curricula for in-patient mental health services and CAMHS
• conducting clinical risk assessment reports on individual service-users, using research-based published instruments, especially within child forensic settings
• assisting services in care planning for potentially aggressive individuals

Our sample consultancy pages are as follows: