Within the past year, research has confirmed that non-expert community psychiatric nurses can safely and effectively deliver cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) to patients with schizophrenia and their carers (Turkington et al., 2002). It is reasonable to expect that other disciplines within mental health would achieve similarly encouraging results (Turkington & Kingdon, 2000). Such interventions are greatly appreciated by patients and
carers, improve job satisfaction for the practitioner and lead to improved insight and coping. It is now contended that case management should be supplemented by such viable, high-quality psychosocial interventions if improved outcomes are to be achieved for patients with schizophrenia (Thornicroft & Susser, 2001). It certainly seems that low case loads alone do not produce such outcomes, as the UK 700 study (Burns et al., 1999) has
demonstrated: how the increased time available is spent would appear to be fundamentally, and not unexpectedly, important.