research

Giving psychology away – the positive ripples of training

When I left the NHS I wondered whether I would have enough work to keep me busy, and felt like the expert witness work I do the family court would probably be the main strand of my income for the foreseeable future. However, perhaps because of my book, I have increasingly been asked to speak at conferences, provide training to various groups of professionals, and consult to organisations – particularly on the topic of working with attachment, trauma and the impact of maltreatment on children. This has become an enjoyable sideline where I can cascade psychological thinking to a wider audience, meet lots of new people, learn from others, and earn a good daily rate without the same emotional weight as doing court work.

I also like any work that involves improving the quality of services, particularly for complex or marginalised client groups. It was therefore very interesting to me when I was asked to meet up with some of the directors of a children’s home company, Keys Childcare, about offering training and consultation to a 20 placement project they were running about an hour away from my base. After some initial meetings, we decided that I would offer some staff training sessions (on attachment, trauma and the impact of maltreatment on children’s development) to all the staff, and then help them to implement a more systematic program of care planning and outcome measurement. The aim was to make decisions about which young people needed therapy and what form of therapy they received more evidence-based, as well as to ensure that all of the staff were involved in making the care for each young person as therapeutic as possible.

This fitted in really well with an outcome measurement system I had been developing for several years, using my ‘BERRI’ checklist of Behaviour, Emotional well-being, Relationships, Risk and Indicators of something requiring further assessment (such as markers of neuro-developmental conditions, or more usual behaviours, perception or thinking which would merit more specialised interventions). I had already developed a system whereby data could be entered into the BERRI online and produce a feedback report, and scores could be compared to track progress over time. This could produce a visual representation of a young person’s needs across the five dimensions, and allow us to be more holistic in our thinking about how to support them to make optimum progress.

radar

After discussion with friends and colleagues, I had started to develop a system for targeting particular concerns to address in the care plan. This involves identifying around three specific concerns from the BERRI and tracking them with greater frequency, typically daily, whilst giving the staff various strategies to try to address them. The target behaviours can be entered into the online system, which can then produce graphs to show progress and to identify any triggers. For example, in the chart below I’d hope that staff would instantly wonder what triggered the big green spike of aggressive behaviour.

tracking

I spent a couple of days each month with Keys, completing the staff training and improving the online system so that it would meet their needs. We also developed a pathway in which there would be a psychological screening assessment when young people arrive in placement, and their paperwork would be properly digested to ensure we had all relevant information from their history as well as an initial BERRI checklist, and we would bring this together in a meeting where the professionals around the child, their care team, the therapist linked to the home and myself would put together a therapeutic care plan document and identify the targets to work on over the coming months. The care plan could contain a summary of the history, a formulation section giving insight into the meaning of the behaviours and concerns the child was showing, then the targets we had agreed to track, and the strategies we had identified to help work on those concerns.

This was seen as a refinement to the existing therapeutic plan the homes in the project were already using, and embraced very positively. We called the approach Psychologically Informed Care-planning and Intervention, with the acronym PICI (which Jonathan Stanley, Chair of ICHA, said was an acronym that led naturally to a marketing slogan: “if you want the best for your child, get PICI”).

After a few months of seeing the changes within the local project, and gathering feedback from staff, social workers and commissioners, Keys decided to expand my remit. They asked me to do training for staff outside of my local project, and then to do some consulting to the wider organisation. They subsequently offered me a job as Clinical Director of Keys, with a remit to train all of their staff and implement the pathway across the whole organisation. This will take me three days per week for the next two years! They have also agreed to employ a psychology team to implement the project in each region, and this week we appointed the first qualified clinical psychologists. In time this team will grow to cover all of Keys services across the UK. We will also be taking on 3.5 assistant psychologists and more therapist time, so that we have a consistent level of consultation to each home in the company (with additional therapy time in the attachment homes where every child placed gets direct therapeutic input). This is super exciting, and I hope that we are able to evaluate the impact on both staff and the young people we look after.

Keys have embraced the new pathway and outcome measurement system as part of a wider push to improve staff training (which now also includes a modular training program that every staff member will work through) and to be able to evidence the effectiveness of their care. This includes a desire to be more evidence-based in how they make decisions about placements and interventions. The changes also coincided with the tenth anniversary of the company moving into childcare and buying the initial ten Keys homes from their previous owners, and also with a rebranding exercise. When they revealed the new branding a few weeks ago in Belfast I was delighted to see that Keys now describe themselves as providing “psychologically informed care for children and young people” and see this as a way to improve the quality of their placements (and through this to gain better Ofsted inspection grades, and become the placement of choice when commissioners seek to place complex young people).

It seems like a natural progression from the kind of consultation I was doing in a CAMHS LAC team, but on an organisation wide scale. My small amount of time has the power to influence more children by working indirectly. By “giving psychology away” I hope I am giving increased insight to those doing the day to day care, and slightly changing their way of working with the young people. Instead of a child getting one hour per week with me, they are getting 38 hours per week with a slightly more psychologically minded caregiver, and my influence can reach 320+ children and nearly 1000 staff.

The staff within Keys have been really enthusiastic about the new pathway and have given me positive feedback for the training days, so the although there is a lot of travelling and a very ambitious timetable for implementation I am really enjoying the work so far. I also get surprisingly positive feedback from training elsewhere, which is so lovely to receive. I think it really stands out for me given how few positive feedback loops there are in most clinical roles nowadays (beyond the occasional client or colleague sending a thank you card). I get a real buzz from positive tweets about my training or keynotes, gaining high scores on conference feedback forms, positive reviews of my book, or complimentary endorsements on LinkedIn.

I went up to Glasgow last week to train some staff to run my group program for parents and carers of maltreated children (Managing Behaviour with Attachment in Mind) and really enjoyed that also. Glaswegians really are the friendliest people in the world, and the group I trained were clearly hugely empathic to the children they work with so they were a delight to train. As I was leaving someone said to me that “training is a way to change the lives of thousands of children”. I think I had made some comment to brush this off (perhaps that it was the clinicians working directly with the families whose relationships were vital, rather than a day from a person like me), but she wasn’t having any of it. She said “no I mean it. I will interact different with the families I see tomorrow and in the future because I spent the day with you, and each person who came to the training will do likewise”. She explained emphatically that she had literally meant that in one day I had done something that would ripple out and change huge numbers of lives. That was pretty humbling to think about.

I’ve also had some exciting discussions about research, service evaluation and different kinds of therapeutic work (for example, working in partnership with collaborative lawyers). So I have decided to have a break from doing expert witness work over the summer and really have a think about what I most want to do. I need to weigh up all the choices in front of me, prioritise the things that make the most impact and/or give me the most satisfaction, and put some energy into finding allies with shared goals (including seeing whether I can recruit another clinical psychologist to LifePsychol in Milton Keynes to pick up some of the therapy and court work). I also want to reclaim my life outside of working hours, and to consider where in the country it makes most sense to be located. But it feels like all the effort I have invested in various projects to date is finally nearing fruition, and there are lots of interesting things on the horizon.

Long ago, I had a task list written on the whiteboard in my office, and Gilly had made me laugh by adding to the bottom of this “build secret volcano base, take over the world”, to reflect my ambitions to change practise on a wide scale. Maybe it isn’t such an unrealistic aim after all.

The double bind of trying to do research as a clinician

In my first job after university I was an Assistant Psychologist on an applied research project evaluating the impact of staff training on the quality of care in old people’s homes. It wasn’t my natural client group, but I loved the fact that we were measuring whether all our fancy psychology ideas actually made a difference to people when applied in practice. My supervisor, Esme Moniz-Cook was an inspiration in this regard, and set a pattern I have aimed to maintain to this day: innovate, evaluate, disseminate. We wrote lots of papers, and each one worked through many iterations in which Esme would cut up a print out of my latest hopeful draft and stick it back together and/or annotate it in different coloured pens. I developed a ritual to overcome the frustration: I would look at the result, take a few deep breaths and then set it aside. Then I’d move the text around on screen to match the arrows and sellotape. Then set it aside. Then do a few of the suggested edits that felt too trivial to argue about and set it aside. Then I’d look at the reduced number of suggestions that was left and decide which were worth disputing and do the rest. Then I’d send it back to Esme and the process would repeat. It was a challenging process, but the papers were always better as a result, and meant I started training with a set of publications on my CV. My doctoral research felt like a piece of cake by comparison. I developed and evaluated a computer based training tool to help people (especially those on the autistic spectrum) learn to recognise facial expressions of emotions and predict how people would feel in different situations. I published a paper from it, of course.

As a newly qualified clinical psychologist in 2000, I was all fired up about continuing to do research. I put in a bid to two charitable funds to expand my doctoral research to a larger population and to follow up the effects after a period of time. It took me a long time to complete the proposal document and to get all the signatures, references and endorsements from both academic and clinical hosts. Both were declined. The first said the bid was so strong that it didn’t need autism specific funding, the latter said that we hadn’t accounted for poor uptake or drop-out because they didn’t know how keen the kids with ASD had been to have extra computer time. It felt like a Catch 22. In retrospect I should have researched the potential funders better; the former probably wanted research that would relate to their patented use of pig secretin in autistic children, they focused on medical interventions and were not interested in something as ‘soft’ as psychology. I was gutted. In the time I had spent preparing the two bids I could have made significant inroads into the study, but I hadn’t got off the starting blocks.

In my next job, I applied my learning to undertaking small bits of research myself by juggling my clinical time. I explored what it was that defined the young people who challenged multiple agencies. I evaluated how social workers in the adoption support team reacted to having the opportunity for consultations with a psychologist. I measured the Theory of Mind skills of Looked After Children and compared them to children with ASD and a control group. I assessed the cognitive ability and mental health of the children in residential care homes within the catchment. Most importantly, when asked to advise on how to improve adoptive matching, I undertook an audit of factors affecting adoptive outcomes across 116 families. This turned out to be the largest study of risk and resilience factors in adoptive matching ever undertaken in the UK.

I found the answers to my questions, and I learnt a lot of new things that other people need to know. But I had no funded time or academic support to disseminate the results. With the smaller projects, I let my Assistants write up the results for publication in professional newsletters and present them with me at conferences. But with the larger studies I wanted to do them justice, and my NHS role never gave me an opportunity to do so.

Once I left the NHS, I followed up my adoption audit 5 years after the initial data collection because I was determined not to let such interesting findings disappear into the ether. Then I made another bid for research funding, and by fluke or serendipity secured a £75,000 Shine Award from the Health Foundation to complete a one year study of the impact of adding brief psychological input into the local diabetes service (something I have previously blogged about). We reached the end of the year and applied for further funds to spread the impact, but were told that they do not fund follow-up data collection, or time to write up results for publication as this should be done in the course of your employment in the NHS. Of course we don’t work in the NHS, and have no funded time as part of a bigger contract or our contract of employment. So the Assistant Psychologist who was doing our data collection and analysis was only funded for the duration of the project, and has since moved on. The £2500 they did offer towards a editing our service user feedback into a short video, revamping our website, a press release and a small local event, requires a long report to release which is now overdue. I’m still trying to work out how to complete and submit the academic papers, but this takes time and means it has to compete against all the other demands of running a business.

Herein lies the big double bind: you need funded time to write bids and to write up papers to give the credibility to future bids, but unless you have academic tenure this time is not funded. For a clinician it competes with more immediate clinical demands, and for someone self-employed it competes with the tasks that actually pay the bills (in my case training, consulting, and up to 4 court assessments per month). There are also other things that demand my time and mental energy (committees, other forms of writing, http://www.clinpsy.org.uk, etc) and I sometimes even have a life outside work. Not everything can fit into the evenings and weekends, even if I allow work to expand into the rest of my life like gap-fill foam.

But I am not defeated. I am determined that the diabetes results will be submitted to peer reviewed journals by the end of the year. And I’m even more determined that what I have learnt about risk and resilience factors in adoptive matching will make its way into social work practice. I’ve considered all kinds of options including writing it up as a PhD, or a book, or a series of papers, or all of these things seeking funding as a grant, or a stipend, or a fellowship. I’ve tried to use my network to find potential funders. But nothing seems to come to fruition in a way that would allow me to have funded time to write it up with input from a statistician, whilst still having at least half my working week to run my company. Perhaps that is just asking the impossible, no matter how close to fruition the research is or how it will impact on people’s lives. I don’t know.

Meanwhile I keep asking the questions and gathering the data that will answer them, even if I can’t share the results. Innovate, evaluate, disseminate is simply part of what I do. I’ve got grand plans for what the next project will be, but I’ll save them for another blog.

BTW, if you have any ideas where I can secure funding, or want to collaborate with me I’d love to hear from you. Likewise if you can offer an overloaded clinician with big ideas a nominal NHS and/or university home, that would also be very welcome. It is twice as hard to bid for funds when you work in a small company that nobody has heard of!