Over the last four years WARRN has developed a national programme of training in risk assessment and risk management and related areas (e.g. personality disorder) with the aim of assisting services across Health and Social Care in meeting this priority area. All the training courses are embedded within evidence-based practice. 

WARRN’s model has always been that evidence-based risk assessment and risk management skills are necessary for all staff, irrespective of professional discipline or seniority, and we felt strongly that to increase training costs would effectively reduce the numbers and percent staff coverage that WARRN would access. Our model has therefore been to keep training costs to a minimum in order to attract high velocity of numbers. We have been significantly helped in this objective by sponsorship from the Welsh Assembly Government.

We have also tried to achieve high coverage of training of staff across Health and Social Care in Wales by implementation of the ‘train-the-trainers’ model of training. We hope that, with time, organisations that engage with WARRN will have a number of trainers fully trained and accredited to provide WARRN courses and that these trainers can then provide high volume and high quality training to all staff within their service at a much reduced cost. This model of training has proved to be popular with services, both because it allows services to be able to train their own staff and because it is the cheapest model of training provision. 

WARRN believes that our training portfolio will allow structured risk assessments to be utilised as part of an open and transparent process that facilitates clinicians, services and clients to work together collaboratively to examine risk areas. The use of evidence based risk assessment tools empowers clinicians and service users to view the risk assessment and management process as a joint problem that they work in partnership to resolve. Open and transparent risk assessment processes, utilising these evidence-base instruments also provide service users with tangible information about risks which, should they not agree they can openly challenge.


Many of the past problems in service development related to risk was associated with a non-standardised approach to the assessment and management of risk both within and across services. One of the main aims of WARRN is to drive forward a standardised and consistent approach across services to: 

(a) training in risk-related issues in mental health; 

(b) the development of risk policy and risk pathways; and 

(c) the consistent and standardised use of evidence-based instruments for risk assessment and risk management.