Success in therapy can be elusive, and failure all too evident. When therapy isn’t working for clients, sometimes they’ll offer excuses to let us down gently. Sometimes, they’ll just not attend, and we’re left with an empty chair. Sometimes (mercifully rare) they’ll complain, either to us or to a professional body. In this context, measures may be one way we can help maximise the likelihood of a successful outcome and minimise the likelihood of a complaint.
Research has demonstrated three things that should make us all a little humble about our therapeutic impact.
- We’re as likely as any profession to have an over-inflated sense of our professional ability and impact.
- We struggle early on to predict which clients are likely to drop out.
- Therapists with higher levels of professional humility get better outcomes.
The measures used in therapy include measures of outcome (e.g. CORE, GAD-7, ORS), measures of process (e.g. SRS, HAQ) and goal-based measures. This workshop will explore how we can use such measures to support our therapeutic instincts and help ensure (at best) that our work is giving clients all they’ve come for, that we minimise dropout, and reduce the likelihood (at worst) of a complaint.
It will take a pragmatic approach to using measures as a form of feedback on the progress and process of therapy. Presenter and participant perspectives and experiences will be explored, as well as the most current evidence for the impact of feedback measures on therapy outcome and process.
Course Content
Organisation
Presenter
Barry is an independent therapist, service consultant, writer and blogger, and co-creator of Therapy Meets Numbers.
Barry has worked in the therapy field for 35+ years, starting as a volunteer in a youth counselling service. A range of roles followed, including youth counselling and managing the counselling service at Royal College of Nursing (RCN).
Barry’s involvement with evaluation and measurement started at the RCN, having implemented the CORE system in 1998. By his departure in 2005 the service was one of the top-performing in the UK (84% of clients reaching a planned ending; 85% achieving a clinical and/or reliable improvement).
Barry joined CORE Information Management Systems in 2005, initially as an independent consultant delivering UK-wide training and consultancy for outcome measurement and service development, then as Director of Training.
Since 2010 Barry has been fully independent. His portfolio includes consultancy, writing and blogging. In 2017, together with colleague Giles, he created Therapy Meets Numbers, a resource dedicated to bridging the gap between research, evaluation and practice. He remains passionate about the role of research, evaluation and feedback in creating the best therapy experience for every client.
