


Are You Any Good…as a Therapist?
It’s a provocative question, isn’t it? It’s also the title of a recent blog post, more of which below. Looking back at my outcomes over 25 years, the answer depends on what period I’m looking at. I know that when I’ve got complacent, or stopped looking at my data, it’s shown in my outcomes. So,…
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Learning to read data like you read sessions … (just read the book!)
In their new book Outcome Measures and Evaluation in Counselling and Psychotherapy, authors Chris Evans and Jo-anne Carlyle have pulled off a rare feat. In making some important statistical concepts accessible, presenting ‘for’ and ‘against’ arguments for measurement in a balanced way, and leading the reader through a range of implementation scenarios, they have written the…
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Can benchmarks improve IAPT performance?
It doesn’t take much digging into national IAPT 2020 – 21 data to discover big differences between service provision in different areas. In the last blog we highlighted (against a national recovery rate of 51%) the performance of Brighton and Hove (34%) and Stoke on Trent (64%) NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) . In this…
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The IAPT postcode lottery: What’s changed?
Why is the recovery rate of one IAPT area 13% higher than the national average? Why is the recovery rate of another 17% lower? And why is the recovery rate of the first almost double the second? In this first of a two-part series we drill into the data to reveal the IAPT postcode lottery.…
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Small gains disguise a miserable picture: IAPT 2020 – 21
In the face of a global pandemic, IAPT has scored some small gains in performance in the past year. Sadly, that’s in the context of a depressingly familiar pattern of high levels of attrition. Here, we present the broad findings, and profile the IAPT Interactive Dashboard that allows you to explore your local data. The…
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Made to Measure: The Strathclyde Inventory
A measure of the fully functioning person In the move to measuring outcome in routine counselling practice, there has been a tendency to lose sight of the client as a whole person, someone who (we hope) will experience growth through the process of being in counselling. Instead, we fall in line with the medical model,…
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Progress feedback: How much difference does it make?
Why all the noise about progress feedback? Back in 2003, Professor Mike Lambert and colleagues published a paper titled Is it time for clinicians to routinely track patient outcome? A meta-analysis.The paper was a meta-analytic review of three large-scale studies whose findings suggested that formally monitoring client progress had a significant impact on outcomes for…
Read MoreDoes supervision affect therapy outcomes?
The problem we have with supervision Mentioned no less than 26 times in BACP’s Ethical Framework, supervision has a central place in our professions. Its role in facilitating our professional development and promoting the welfare of clients almost goes without saying. Most of us value supervision, find it helpful, and wouldn’t countenance being without it.…
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How acceptable are outcome measures to young people?
