Profile – Tim Colman

Name: Tim Colman.
Job title: Team manager, crisis resolution team at
Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust.
How long in the job? Two years.
Career highlight: Getting this team up and
running.
Career lowpoint: Realising I had been working in
the in-patient area for too long.
Best training ever done: Psycho-social
interventions. Treatment for people with psychosis often centres on
medication and little else. This course was refreshing in focusing
on other methods of assessment and treatment. It attempted to
challenge some existing practices, especially pertinent when you
have been in the job a long time.
Over the course of my career, I wish I had:
Attended fewer meetings.
Over the course of my career, I wish I hadn’t:
Agreed to attend said meetings.
I applied for my current job because: It was the
one I had been waiting for. I was aware of crisis teams and the
work they were doing and knew it was for me.
The best move I’ve ever made was: This one.
Me and my career: With this job I had the brief of
setting up my team, writing policies, working out what we should do
and recruiting. I visited other teams to see how they worked and
pinched ideas. As a result, we have a clarity of purpose. It was a
challenge to set up the team and for it to become accepted as part
of the local psychiatric services, particularly as we gatekeep
admissions but this has now happened. Our clear goals centre on
assessing people with mental health problems and, if viable,
offering home treatment as an alternative to admission. We are
seeing good results and reducing admissions. That is rewarding. I
did near enough 13 years with in-patients and would find it very
difficult to return to the wards.

CURRICULUM VITAE
2003-current: Team manager, crisis resolution team,
Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust.
1995-2003: Ward manager, various hospitals.
1993-4: Community psychiatric nurse.
1990-3: Staff nurse, then deputy charge nurse,
Leicester Brandon mental health unit.
1987-1990: Student nurse.
1985-7: Care assistant, Staffordshire Council.