AdaPT project - Dr Clare Symons video transcript
Clare Symons, Head of Research at BACP
Hello, I’m Clare Symons, I’m head of Research at BACP and I’m going to talk to you a little bit about our AdaPT Project, a project to Advance Practice through Tracking. This project aims to support BACP members who are in private practice by giving you free access to an online tool called Pragmatic Tracker. This tool enables you to do all sorts of things in your practice like manage client appointments, record session notes, but importantly from our point of view in Research it also enables you to make use of a range of outcomes measures, research measures. So these are measures like the CORE form which some of you will be familiar with, we use the CORE-10 form as part of this project, we also use a form called the Session Rating Scale, but there are many other forms that could be used.
Why might you consider this? Why could it be helpful for you? And why would I encourage you to consider joining this project and starting to use these forms in your practice? Well, existing research tells us that routinely reviewing client progress in therapy in the way that is possible through the use of outcome measures can help further improve the therapeutic relationship and lead to better outcomes for clients, so that’s good news. But we also know that practitioners can find using outcome measures off-putting or challenging and that, quite legitimately, many practitioners start off with concerns that using measures routinely in their practice might be unhelpful for clients or disruptive to the counselling process.
We’ve designed this project to make using the on-line system and introducing outcome measures to your practice, to be as easy as it possibly can be. There’s training that’s supplied as part of the project, there’s ongoing support for participants in the project. And our intention in this project is to help you find the best way that you can of integrating use of these measures into your practice so that it enhances how you practice and how you work with your clients rather than disrupting the counselling.
If you were to join this project, not only could it have those sort of benefits for your own practice but it’s also a way of you contributing to the work BACP is seeking to do to increase the evidence base for the effectiveness of counselling and psychotherapy. So by pooling data collected in this project, with the consent of your clients, of course, we can build up a large database of data that we can use to analyse and research.
The feedback so far from our participants has been very positive about the project and we’re keen to learn more from members about how this way of working can help practice and also what the drawbacks might be. So we have extended the project until February 2022 and we’ve extended the number of licenses that we can make available free of charge to BACP members who are in private practice. We’d very much like to welcome more of you to the project. So what do you need to do if you are interested. Well, there’s more detail if you are interested on the project webpage and the next step if you re interested is to check your eligibility for involvement by clicking on the link on that page. I do hope you’ll take the time to find out more about the project and that we will welcome you as a participant sometime soon. Thank you.