Violence Risk Assessment and Management in Outpatient Clinical Practice

The aims of this review were to highlight fundamental distinctions between risk assessment in forensic versus therapeutic settings, review the best available evidence regarding key risk and protective factors for violence of particular relevance to clinicians in outpatient therapeutic settings, and describe an approach to evaluating and managing violence risk in outpatient treatment.

An integrative literature review was undertaken to examine violence risk and protective factors most relevant to outpatient clinicians in therapeutic settings.

Based on the available research, the Integrative Outpatient Violence Risk Assessment and Management (IVRAM) model, a 5-step strategy for evaluating and managing violence risk in therapeutic contexts, is introduced. The IVRAM emphasizes the integration of nomothetic and idiographic data through a focus on empirically derived dynamic risk and protective factors in the context of an individualized anamnestic analysis.

Clinicians working in forensic and therapeutic settings will increasingly benefit from the contributions of the other as the distinctions between risk assessment and risk management continue to decrease.