Democratic development of standards: the community of communities--a quality network of therapeutic communities.

As the inevitability of regulation and accountability dawned on the British Therapeutic Community movement at the end of the 1990s, a polarised debate took place. The product of that debate is now an action research based system of audit, with its principles and methods based on therapeutic community practice. This paper is written four years after the discussions started, and describes how the "Community of Communities" was conceived, what its methods are, some of the results from it first year of operation, and reflection about the nature of the process itself