Implementing person-centred risk assessment to reduce coercion in a long-term mental social care institution in Slovenia

Abstract Risk and risk assessments have received much critical attention in mental health social work, also in the context of deinstitutionalization. To explore how risk assessment may contribute to reducing coercion, ethnographic action research was conducted between September 2020 and September 2023 in a Slovenian long-term mental social care institution with a pilot project of deinstitutionalization. Three case studies are reported. In each case, a member of the action research group participated in direct work with the resident and their team, writing a person-centred risk assessment and trying to implement non-coercive risk management strategies. Risk assessment has been shown to have the potential both to prevent involuntary admissions and to foster discharges of involuntarily admitted residents. Introducing social work methods such as risk assessment requires an organizational environment that supports such methods. This article shows that the repressive implications of the concept of risk can be resisted in practice not by rejecting the concept, but by redefining it, especially through the use of a person-centred risk assessment. However, the challenge for both researchers and practitioners is to show how to guide the transition to community-based settings in a person-centred way, based on social work methods.