To describe the introduction of a clinical governance programme within a regional forensic psychiatric service.

The established programme meets the objectives of clinical governance. It affords regular appraisal of model practice and dissemination of information among staff. It provides a forum for continuing professional development, assessment of users' views and input of its staff to service development.

A functional clinical governance programme is possible, and likely to produce considerable benefits, but requires substantial commitment from clinical, secretarial and managerial staff. To be sustainable in the long term it may require additional funding. It is still too early to seek to evaluate any long term changes produced in patient care by the process.

The use of the term ‘client’ has become increasingly popular among non-medical staff in psychiatric practice. We sought to describe the preferences and attitudes of people attending a psychiatric clinic to the terms patient and client. A questionnaire and case note review was employed.

147 people completed the questionnaire, of these 77% preferred the term patient. There was no subgroup that preferred the term client. Attitudes towards the two terms were significantly different, with a greater antipathy demonstrated towards the term client.

The majority of people attending a psychiatric clinic prefer the use of the term patient; the term client is disliked.

We aimed to find out how patients on clozapine felt about clozapine treatment. A structured questionnaire was given to 1284 consecutive patients attending 27 clozapine clinics in the UK.

The response rate was 44.4% (570 forms returned). This cohort of responders to the questionnaire consisted, for the most part, of Caucasian males who had been taking clozapine for more than 2 years. Respondents expressed largely favourable views on clozapine treatment. For example, 86.1% claimed to feel better on clozapine and 88.6% claimed to prefer to remain on clozapine than to change to another drug. Many patients stated that they disliked having to undergo blood testing, but a large majority (87.0%) felt that the advantages of clozapine outweighed disadvantages. All other responses supported this overall favourable view of clozapine therapy.

Patients stabilised on clozapine are largely content with their treatment. These results suggest that clozapine is effective as assessed by patients' own standards and that adherence to therapy is likely to be good.

Psychotherapy patients' views of treatment received from two senior registrars were obtained by questionnaire. The aim of the study was to give patients an opportunity to reflect on therapy and help trainees evaluate their therapeutic style and the therapy they provided.

The response rate was 86% (25/29). All patients recalled key issues covered in therapy, 96% (24/25) found therapy valuable. Seventy-two per cent (18/25) made comments about therapists' style and 20% (5/25) made suggestions for improvement of the service.

Clinical, service and training implications are discussed and it is suggested that this form of patient survey is a useful adjunct in outcome evaluation of treatments and of training.

To improve liaison between local schools and child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) by exploring teachers' experiences and perceptions of CAMHS. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 25 volunteer primary school teachers.

Teachers reported exhausting education-based resources before seeking external advice. Most had positive experiences of child mental health services and were keen to be more involved. They favoured a service that provided rapid advice and ongoing support. Many complained about problems in communication.

Child psychiatrists should collaborate more effectively with teachers to promote mental health and manage children with behavioural and psychological problems.