Therapeutic community effectiveness: a systematic international review of therapeutic community treatment for people with personality disorders and mentally disordered offenders

This review is part of a review of therapeutic community interventions which aims to scope the field at the same time as answering questions on effectiveness, therefore the inclusion criteria for the review are very broad. The approach to scoping the field and subsequently selecting studies is systematic and well described. The literature search was very comprehensive and it is unlikely that any research would have been missed, as seen in the funnel plot. Some details of the review process are given and there is some assessment of validity using levels of evidence, which are then applied appropriately in the meta-analysis. The meta-analysis seems to be appropriate for the studies selected, although the relative risk may have been a better summary estimate than the odds ratio, and the subgroup analyses also seem appropriate. Study details are presented in the report. The authors' conclusions follow from the results.