The Growing Evidence Base for Feedback-Informed Treatment (FIT)
Dateline: February 2, 2011 Location: Anchorage, AK Greetings from Anchorage, Alaska where I've been traveling and teaching about feedback-informed treatment (FIT). On Monday, I worked with dedicated behavioral health professionals living and working in Barrow--the northern most point in the United States. FIT has literally reached the "top of the world." How ...
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Getting FIT: The Advanced Intensive Training
Dateline: January 19, 2011 Buffalo, New York The New Year is here and travel/training season is in full swing. Last week, I was in Ohio and Virginia. This week New York and Idaho (keep your weather fingers crossed, it's going to be dicey getting from here to there and home ...
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Getting FIT in the New Year: The Latest Evidence
John Norcross, Ph.D. is without a doubt the researcher that has done the most to highlight the evidence-base supporting the importance of the relationship between clinician and consumer in successful behavioral healthcare. The second edition of his book, Psychotherapy Relationships that Work, is about to be released. Like the last edition, ...
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Becoming FIT: Simple but not Easy
Becoming FIT (feedback informed in treatment). Ask any experienced practitioner and they will tell you, "it's such a simple idea, but it's not easy." In addition to the time it takes to master the administration and interpretation of formal feedback, special skills are required for using the information to guide ...
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The War on Unhappiness Heats Up
Back in September, I blogged about an article by Gary Greenberg published in the August issue of Harper's magazine that took aim at the "helping profession." He cast a critical eye on the history of the field, it's colorful characters, constantly shifting theoretical landscape, and claims and counterclaims regarding "best practice." Several paragraphs were devoted to my own work; specifically, research documenting ...
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Feedback informed treatment (FIT) takes center stage in Sweden
Just a short entry to highlight recent developments in Sweden... On November 17th and 18th, over 500 politicians, agency directors, and service managers gathered together to discuss "the future of alcohol and drug treatment" in Sweden. High on the agenda? Feedback Informed Treatment! Psychologist and ICCE Associate, Gun-Eva Langdahl and the rest ...
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Cha-cha-cha-changes on a Grand Scale: Think Tank Meets in Chicago
David Mee-Lee, MD Bill Miller, Ph.D. Scott D. Miller, Ph.D. Jim Prochaska, Ph.D. Don Kuhl, CEO Whether in the United States or Europe, Asia or Australia, the field of behavioral health is undergoing a period of dramatic change--some would say, "transformation." At least that's the verdict of the group bought ...
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Growing by Leaps and Bounds: ICCE Membership Nearing 2000!
In December 2009, the International Center for Clinical Excellence was officially launched. From our booth at the Evolution of Psychotherapy conference, the international web-based community "went live," adding hundreds of members in a few days. By April, as I reported in my blog, over 1000 clinicians, researchers, policy makers, and adminsitrators ...
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Pushing the Research Envelope: Getting Researchers to Conduct Clinically Meaningful Research
At the recent ACE conference, I had the pleasure of learning from the world's leading experts on expertise and top performance. Equally stimulating were conversations in the hallways between presentations with clinicians, policy makers, and researchers attending the event. One of those was Bill Andrews, the director of the HGI Practice ...
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Am-ACE-ing Events in Kansas City: The First International Achieving Clinical Excellence Conference
Here's a riddle for you: What do therapists, researchers, case managers, magicians, surgeons, award winning musicians, counselors, jugglers, behavioral health agency directors, and balloon twisting artists have in common? Answer: They all participated in the first "Achieving Clinical Excellence" held last week in Kansas City, Missouri. It's true. The "motley" crew of ...
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What is "Best Practice?"
You have to admit the phrase “best practice” is the buzzword of late. Graduate school training programs, professional continuing education events, policy and practice guidelines, and funding decisions are tied in some form or another to the concept. So, what exactly is it? At the State and Federal level, lists of so-called “evidence-based” ...
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No Therapist Left Behind: Improving the Quality and Outcome of Behavioral Health Services One Practitioner at a Time
Staying “up-to-date” isn’t easy in today’s practice environment. In these lean economic times, training budgets are often the first to be cut. On the other hand, trying to separate the “important” from “irrelevant” in our information-rich age can be, as Mitchell Kapor once observed, “a bit like trying to get a drink ...
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Clinician Beware: Ignoring Research Can be Hazardous to Your Professional (and Economic) Health
“Studies show…” “Available data indicate…” “This method is evidence-based…” My how things have changed. Twenty years ago when I entered the field, professional training, continuing education events, and books rarely referred to research or evidence. Now, everyone refers to the “data.” The equation is simple: no research = no money. Having “an evidence-base” ...
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What Works in the Treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder? The Definitive Study
What works in the treatment of people with post-traumatic stress? The influential Cochrane Collaboration--an "independent network of people" whose self-professed mission is to help "healthcare providers, policy makers, patients, their advocates and carers, make well-informed decisions, concludes that, "non trauma-focused psychological treatments [do] not reduce PTSD symptoms as significantly...as individual trauma ...
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Goodbye Freud, Hello Common Factors
Gary Greenberg certainly has a way with words. In his most recent article, The War on Unhappiness, published in the August issue of Harper's magazine, Greenberg focuses on the "helping profession"--its colorful characters, constantly shifting theoretical landscape, and claims and counterclaims regarding "best practice." He also gives prominence to the most robust and replicated finding in psychotherapy outcome research: ...
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The Effects of Feedback on Medication Compliance and Outcome: Follow Up on The University of Pittsburgh Study
Late last year, I blogged about a study being conducted at the University of Pittsburgh by Dr. Jan Pringle, the director of the Program Evaluation Research Unit in the School of Pharmacology and her colleague, Dr. Michael Melczak. You'll recall, there were two conditions in the study. In the first, pharmacists--the ...
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