Evaluation of the personality disorder positive outcomes programme (PDPOP) in general practice

Background: GPs and primary care services have been identified as crucial to the care of people with personality disorder. Individuals living with personality disorder frequently face stigma and difficulties when accessing healthcare. Primary care staff often describe feeling demoralised, incompetent, hurt or angry after difficult interactions with patients.

Aim: To evaluate the effect of PDPOP training delivered to 10 GP practices in 2022-23.

Design & setting: PDPOP is a co-produced training course aimed at all staff within GP surgeries to help teams, including administrative, reception and clinical staff, to feel confident and skilled when interacting with patients who may have personality disorder.

Method: The New World Kirkpatrick Model was used to evaluate the training, through questionnaires pre- training, post-training, at follow-up, and semi-structured interviews.

Results: Evaluation found that practice teams were highly satisfied with PDPOP training and found it relevant, engaging and useful. Results demonstrated that staff felt more confident and skilled when interacting with patients who may have personality disorder through use of the training's core concepts. Increased confidence in managing distress, crisis and participant's own emotions, was associated with reduced impact on staff at interview. Practices also demonstrated action taken post-training to reduce dependency on primary care services.

Conclusion: By including lived-experience trainers and introducing core concepts, PDPOP has demonstrated a sustained positive impact on primary care teams. Further expansion of this type of training may help to increase the confidence of healthcare staff in delivering care to patients with personality disorder and similar complex emotional needs.