How does a small counselling or psychotherapy service make its data count?
Well, if the service is part of BACP’s children and young people’s practice research network, it can join with others to contribute to the evidence base for CYP’s counselling and psychotherapy and use the data to help them understand more about their own service. Win – win!
BACP’s CYP practice research network has over 600 members working in schools, voluntary and community organisations and online. BACP developed a toolkit for collecting routine outcome measures and a standardised data set to support the collection of a larger pool of data. They recently conducted a small scale pilot study – the first example of a non-individual service to use COMMIT.
When a service uses COMMIT to store and manage their data, an information sharing agreement (ISA) is required to safeguard confidential information. In this instance, BACP needed to ensure that additional ISA’s were in place between the pilot services and themselves as they collected the data as an intermediary. This also covered services using COMMIT as a client management system.
Feedback from the pilot has been really positive and BACP intends to roll out this model to more services to further increase the data pool. This will contribute to a more robust evidence base. Services will also be able to access analysis from their own data to be able to explore and present their demographics, impact, strengths and areas for development.
If you are a small service seeking to embed the use of routine outcome measures and are part of a formal or informal network such as BACP’s CYP practice research network or a CVS support service, accessing data collection and analysis systems can be more achievable as a group. Please get in touch with us to explore this idea further.
Many thanks to Charlie Jackson for providing us with this case study.