The World’s Leading Violence Risk Assessment Instrument
Version 3 of the HCR-20 is the latest version of a comprehensive set of professional guidelines for violence risk assessment and management based on the Structured Professional Judgement (SPJ) model.
Violence risk assessment–also called threat assessment–is a critical part of service delivery in health care, social service, criminal justice, and occupational settings. It is practiced by people from many different backgrounds, including psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, occupational and rehabilitation therapists, institutional and community corrections officers, police and public safety officers, human resources managers, and corporate and private security officers. What unites these diverse professionals is the desire to identify cases in which people pose a risk of violence and determine what steps are necessary to protect public safety.
The HCR-20 was developed to help structured decisions about violence risk. Since the publication of Version 1 in 1995 and Version 2 in 1997, it has become the world’s most widely used and best validated violence risk assessment instrument. It has been translated into 20 languages and adopted or evaluated in more than 35 countries. Version3, developed over the past 5 years on the basis of extensive clinical beta testing and empirical evaluation, promises to be even more useful than its predecessors.