Training in Evidence-Based Psychotherapies
The faculty and collaborators of the Center for Psychotherapy Research have expertise in training clinicians in the use of a variety of evidence-based psychotherapies. Complimented by our long history of training clinicians in evidence-based psychotherapies in real world community settings as part of our program of research, we have tremendous experience in developing training programs, specific training workshops, and consultation programs. We’ve leveraged this experience to support training in evidence-based psychotherapies in our outpatient psychiatry services. We developed training programs based on focus groups with front line clinicians to ensure that we disseminate the evidence-based psychotherapies that best meet their needs, including cognitive therapy, behavioral activation, motivational interviewing, and interpersonal approaches. We’ve conducted expert training workshops and created a library of asynchronous training workshops for these psychotherapies, each adapted to meet the specific needs of the individual clinic. Finally, our faculty have run ongoing consultation groups to support clinical training in these settings.
- Grant Title: Development of Electronic Quality Reporting System for Behavioral Activation for MDD in CMHC Setting
- Grant Number: 5R21MH116362-02
- Principal Investigator: Mary Beth Connolly Gibbons
Abstract
Behavioral Activation (BA) is an important therapeutic intervention for major depressive disorder (MDD) that already has substantial evidence of its effectiveness particularly with severe cases of MDD. There are currently reliable and valid observer rated measures of adherence and competence to BA techniques, but like most measures designed to assess adherence and competence within an efficacy context, these measures are costly and time consuming. Although the past decade has shown a concerted effort to disseminate efficacious psychotherapies to community settings, there are few reliable and efficient measures to assess the quality of psychotherapy delivery in these community settings. Our goal is to develop clinician and consumer pragmatic measures of BA quality that are reliable, feasible, and acceptable in a community mental health setting. We will develop clinician and consumer measures and will collect a prospective feasibility sample to insure that our measure is reliable, feasible, and acceptable in the community mental health setting. We will work with experts and community stakeholders to develop a pool of self-report items feasible in the community setting. We will have experts in BA rate each of the items from audiotaped recordings of treatment sessions from our current effectiveness trial of BA in the community setting. We will select reliable items that predict symptom course and target change for our final clinician and consumer quality measures to insure that we develop quality measures that capture the important aspects of BA quality. We will have both clinicians previously trained to competence in BA as part of an effectiveness trial and consumers seeking treatment for depression in the community rate the new pragmatic assessments of BA quality on tablet computers that allow for instant electronic capture following outpatient sessions. Finally, we will assess the acceptability of our new pragmatic BA quality assessments from the perspective of community stakeholders. BA is an obvious fit for improving care in CMHCs and shows great promise as a treatment for depression but reliable and valid pragmatic measures of BA quality are needed to support disseminations efforts.
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