I have already written blog posts about the great half day pre-conference workshop I went to - "Glasgow BABCP conference: Pre-conference workshop - the excellent Michelle Craske on 'Exposure therapy in the 21st century'" - and the first full day of the conference - "Glasgow BABCP conference: 1st day - lecture rant, Anke Ehlers on PTSD, a workshop on 'the strong & curious therapist', and more".  Sadly I didn't get to the second day of the conference, but I certainly went to the final half day attending a very fine two hour 'clinical skills' class with Jaime Delgadillo on "Improving CBT outcomes using outcome prediction and feedback methods" and an intriguing keynote lecture by Steve Hollon on "Is CBT enduring or do antidepressant medication prolong the underlying episode".

If you haven't read Jaime's very recent Lancet Psychiatry paper "Feedback-informed treatment versus usual psychological treatment for depression and anxiety: a multisite, open-label, cluster randomised controlled trial", then you should ... or at least you should if you're a therapist who is interested in becoming more helpful for your clients.  It was something of a travesty, that this clinical skills class was squeezed into a little room on the final half-day of the conference and was only attended by eighteen participants.  I think Jaime should have been asked to give a keynote lecture on this important material ... and no doubt, in the future he will be.  This clinical skills class felt a bit like catching an up & coming band in a small club before they hit the big time.

So why do I think this material is so important?  Well I have argued for ages that therapists should be using feedback methods to track their outcomes and that this is likely to be especially important for not-on-track cases - see, for example, these two 2011 posts "The Norway feedback project: a clear and sensible way to make psychotherapy more effective" and "Guildford BABCP conference: What shall we do about the fact that there are supershrinks and pseudoshrinks?".  This year's Lancet Psychiatry paper seems the most extensive & thorough demonstration so far that using feedback and problem-solving approaches for not-on-track (NOT) cases provides significant & worthwhile benefits ... and last year's smaller study - "Improving the efficiency of psychological treatment using outcome feedback technology" - suggests there may be cost savings involved as well.

More to follow ...