Up close: family therapy challenges and innovations around the world.

Family therapists from 10 different countries (China, India, Israel including Palestinian citizens, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, and the United Kingdom) describe systemic therapy in their contexts and current innovative work and challenges. They highlight the importance of family therapy continuing to cut across disciplines, the power of systems ideas in widely diverse settings and institutions (such as courts, HIV projects, working with people forced into exile), extensive new mental health initiatives (such as in Turkey and India), as well as the range of family therapy journals available (four alone in Spain). Many family therapy groups are collaborating across organizations (especially in Asia) and the article presents other ideas for connections such as a clearing house to inexpensively translate family therapy articles into other languages.

'Benign invigilation': using appreciative inquiry to reposition clinical risk in multi-disciplinary CAMH teams.

In response to a spate of serious untoward incident enquiries, CAMHS team leaders in East London, UK, embarked on a series of clinical risk workshops with staff teams. Complementary to what might be called retrospective organisational responses to high risk events, these prospective workshops were predicated on the idea that risk reduction is increased when individuals in teams are responsive to one another, when teams are positively risk-aware and when risk awareness is seen as having the capacity to predict what may go wrong in the future.

Research Leading to Action: A Study of Accessibility of a CAMH Service to Ethnic Minority Families.

BACKGROUND: This article describes an action research project aimed at examining the accessibility of a child and adolescent mental health service to its ethnic minority populations. METHOD: A Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service was involved in a process of inquiry, deciding first to compare rate of referral and treatment outcomes for the four largest ethnic groups amongst the client population. Following discussion of findings throughout the service, groups of Bangladeshi service users and professionals were interviewed about low rates of referral amongst this community. RESULTS: By highlighting the different referral rates and profiles of different ethnic groups, the study elicited an increasingly shared commitment across the service to addressing issues of accessibility to ethnic minority communities. CONCLUSIONS: The study is presented as one possible model of response to the challenge to all public services made by Macpherson (1999), to examine the 'appropriateness' of the service offered to different ethnic populations.