Evaluating Therapist Training and Client Outcomes

Therapists training is often considered a cornerstone of guaranteeing safe and effective treatment for the help-seeking populations that therapists serve. A large amount of resources are spent each year on training courses, workshops and continuing education for therapists.

While this area is widely researched, the typical evaluations of therapists training efforts focus on either therapist skill acquisition, as measured by competency or fidelity measurements or therapists’ own ratings of satisfaction or helpfulness of the training content. Relatively few studies evaluate the effectiveness of training efforts with measures of actual client outcome, which is the definitive goal of any training efforts in psychotherapy.

This systematic review aims to gather and systematically assess all relevant studies on the topic of therapist training’s effect on client outcome. To accomplish this, we will search databases for previous review articles and extract primary studies of interest. Only studies with an adequate design that allows for inferences regarding the impact of therapist training on client outcome will be included in the final synthesis.

This research project is a collaboration between Örebro University and Karolinska Institute. For the preregistration protocol on PROSPERO see the following link; https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42023486417

Affiliations:

Osame Salim, PhD student & Licensed Psychologist, Center for Health and Medical Psychology (CHAMP), School of Behavioural, Social and Legal Sciences, Örebro University.

Johannes Larsson, PhD student & Licensed Psychologist, Center for Health and Medical Psychology (CHAMP), School of Behavioural, Social and Legal Sciences, Örebro University.

Simon Fagernäs, PhD student & Licensed Psychologist, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Psychotherapeutic method, education and implementation
Karolinska Institute.

Emma Högberg Ragnarsson, PhD student & Licensed Psychologist, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Psychotherapeutic method, education and implementation
Karolinska Institute.