Therapists do really want to get better at what they do. Professional development is both a deeply held value and a career long aspiration. It is also central to lifelong job satisfaction. Unfortunately, traditional approaches (e.g., lectures, clinical experience, even supervision) don’t work; it doesn’t get us any better in our craft. Gleaning from studies the team at ICCE and I have conducted on studying highly effective therapists (aka Supershrinks), the workshop focuses on helping practitioners develop a personalised system to as much as double the effectiveness of treatment while simultaneously reducing costs, drop-out rates and deterioration.

In a Nutshell, Why Adopt a Trans-theoretical FIT Approach?

• Routine outcome monitoring and feedback as much as doubles the “effect size” (reliable and clinically significant change);
• Cuts dropout rates by as much as half; • Reduces deterioration by 33%;
• Reduces hospitalisations and shortens length of stay by 66%;
• Significantly reduces cost of care compared to non-feedback groups (which increased in cost);
• Provides accountability to funders and organisations for services rendered;
• A platform for a given client to be an active agent of decision making in the treatment process; and
• Provision for conducting ongoing practice-based research, localised to the given context, while allowing a comparison with international norms.

Objectives

The aims of the workshop are focused on the tangibles. Things we can do now to change the course of your future. It’s not set out to change your therapeutic orientation or allegiance to any models, rather, it’s solely designed to give you a structure to get better at what you do, improving one therapist at a time, helping one client at a time.

Here are the three aims

1. Participants will learn to adopt three systematic steps to improving outcomes of their intervention work.
2. Participants will learn a method for identifying cases at risk of dropping out of treatment or experiencing a negative or null outcome.
3. Participants will learn a method for identifying and improving areas of weakness in their clinical work.

For Whom

For mental health service providers (counsellors, psychologists, social workers, psychotherapists), clinical supervisors, agency administrators and clinical managers.

Agencies and practitioners across the globe are now beginning to realise the potential of implementing routine outcomes monitoring (ROM) in their service deliveries (Miller, Hubble, Chow, Seidel, 2015). It is well-established that ROM doubles the “effect size” (reliable and clinically significant change), cuts dropout rates by as much as half, and reduces deterioration by 33%. (Miller, Bargmann, Chow, Seidel, & Maeschalck, 2015; Miller, Hubble, Chow Seidel, 2013). However, most clinicians and administrators have not yet found a way to integrate the use of clinical data and clinical intuition in a systematic step-wise sequence. This requires a synergistic micro-to-macro symbiotic process of integrating outcomes “one client at a time,” “one therapist at a time,” and “one agency at a time”.

In a Nutshell, Why Do We Need to Go Beyond Measuring Outcomes?

• Measuring outcomes alone does not improve performance;
• Measuring outcomes is not just an administrative process, but it is a clinical imperative towards the people we serve;
• Clinicians and administers typically fail to utiliise the full potential of clinical data to guide their work;
• About 1 in 10 clients in our caseloads experience deterioration (Swift & Greenberg, 2015). Yet, most practitioners do not have a clear critical decision making process to effect change;
• Recent evidence by my colleagues and I suggest that the more effective therapists weave the use of feedback measures differently than the average pracitioners (Chow, in press; Chow, 2014; Miller & Chow, in press; Miller, Hubble, Chow, & Seidel, 2015).
• Practitioners typically are not equipped to use aggregated outcome information to guide their resources in professional development;
• If agencies go beyond the use of ROM solely as a measurement tool, agencies will be able to develop their own practice-based evidence (PBE), surpassing borrowing evidence from evidence-based practice (EBP) research;
• Developing a practice research network (PRN) across the agency will entail research efforts to be closely linked to ground level practice issues, and in turn, inform means and methods for improvement in specific service deliveries (e.g., Andrews, Wislocki, Short, Chow, & Minami,, 2013); Barkham et al., 2006), and
• Going beyond simply measuring outcomes can induce an accountable transformation at four key levels, namely with clients, practitioner, clinical supervision, and agency levels.

The aims of the workshop are focused on the tangibles. This workshop builds on the previous introductory workshop, Feedback Informed Treatment (FIT): Three Steps to Becoming Your Personal Best in Psychotherapy.

Objectives

1. “One Client at a Time”: Participants will learn to use, implement, and guide service deliveries based on routine outcome monitoring (ROM) information
2. “One Therapist at a Time”: Participants will learn how to employ feedback information to guide their own professional development using a deliberate practice framework
3. “One Agency at a Time”: Building upon the first two objectives, participants will learn to interpret outcome and engagement data to improve service provision as a whole.

For Whom

1. For mental health service providers (counsellors, psychologists, social workers, psychotherapists), clinical supervisors, agency administrators and clinical managers.
2. Participants need to have attended “Feedback Informed Treatment (FIT): Three Steps to Becoming Your Personal Best in Psychotherapy”, or received prior training approved by the International Center of Clinical Excellence (ICCE) (e.g., FIT intensive workshops).