Construction and extension of an outcome monitoring system: domain specific feedback in a psychiatric clinic setting

[Truncated] A substantial minority of psychotherapy patients do not experience positive change following treatment and a smaller minority deteriorate by the end of treatment (Lambert, 2013). One promising approach to minimizing the number of patients who do not experience positive change is progress monitoring that involves feedback of outcome measures to therapists and patients (Castonguay, Barkham, Lutz, & McAleavey, 2013a).Though progress monitoring and feedback has been shown to improve outcomes for patients who are not expected to experience positive change currently the majority of feedback systems use a single measure to monitor progress (e.g., Probst et al., 2013). It is hypothesized that progress monitoring and feedback from multiple measures capturing different domains will improve patient outcomes compared to progress monitoring and feedback using a single measure.

The thesis aims to contribute to the field of patient focused research by describing the development and evaluation of a program of monitoring patient progress across multiple domains in a hospital-based psychiatric clinic. It was hypothesized that presenting feedback from multiple domains to clinicians and patients would significantly improve subjective wellbeing and significantly reduce affective psychological distress for those patients at risk of poor outcome.