The Camberwell Assessment of Need-Forensic Version (CANFOR) is an individual needs assessment scale designed to identify the needs of people with mental health problems in contact with forensic services. The book under review is a manual for the use of the CANFOR.

The NHS and Community Care Act 1990 (Department of Health, 1991) recommended that care and treatment for people with mental health problems should be based on the assessment of individual need. Needs assessment also assists the planning and development of services. Although the social and clinical needs of mentally disordered offenders are in many ways similar to general psychiatric patients, there are also differences, with more emphasis on certain domains such as comorbid personality disorder, substance misuse and offending behaviours. There are also additional dimensions of need to consider in mentally disordered offenders, such as the level of security required and political need, where consideration is given to the effect of the index offence, for example if it was a high profile case (Reference Cohen and EastmanCohen & Eastman, 2000; Reference ShawShaw, 2003).

Structured needs assessment measures are useful in clinical practice and research to provide a baseline measure of need to inform care planning and subsequently, at intervals, to determine the effectiveness of interventions.

The CANFOR is an assessment scale for clinical research use, designed to measure needs in forensic mental health service users.

The manual for the CANFOR provides a brief overview of the principles of needs assessment and the range of needs assessment instruments available. It includes a description of the development of the Camberwell Assessment of Need (CAN) (Reference Slade, Thornicroft and LoftusSlade et al, 1999), the Camberwell Assessment of Needs, Development and Intellectual Disabilities (CANDID) (Reference Xenitidis, Thornicroft and LeeseXenitidis et al, 2000) and the CANFOR. It then concentrates on the structure of the CANFOR and how need is assessed in 25 domains. It describes the structure of the questions used to assess problems in particular domains of need in the past month, and the exploration of interventions provided and their efficacy. It covers the different versions of the CANFOR, the forensic research version, the clinical version and the short version.

The book is a straightforward manual on the use of the CANFOR. I would recommend it to all clinicians and researchers contemplating measuring need in mentally disordered offenders.