The Division 12 Section VII Working Group on Violence Risk Assessment (David Drummond, Phillip Kleespies, Marc Hillbrand, and Lisa Firestone) have prepared an excellent resource on assessing violence risk in general practice. It is intended as a quick reference for situations in which a clinician working in a non-forensic clinical setting may need to assess whether a patient poses a risk of violence. Such situations may include assessment of risk in planning for a psychiatric inpatient discharge, release from an emergency department, assessment of violence risk to third parties, and situations in which clinicians find themselves the target of a patient who is engaging in inappropriate and threatening approach behavior (e.g., stalking).
Click Here to Go to the Clinician’s Toolkit Page on Assessing Violence Risk
[box] Please contact Damion Grasso, Ph.D. (web editor) if you have any suggestions for useful content to add to the clinician toolkit. [/box]We welcome your comments on this new resource, as well as any of your own tips or experiences pertaining to violence risk assessment.