Setting up inpatient behavioral treatment programs: The staff needs assessment
✍ Scribed by Patrick W. Corrigan; E. Paul Holmes; Daniel Luchins; Joseph Parks; Abdul Basit; Ethel Delaney; Donna Kayton-Weinberg
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1994
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 685 KB
- Volume
- 9
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1072-0847
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Despite the success that behavior therapy has demonstrated in treating severely mentally ill adults, widespread impact of behavioral treatments on this population has been limited because the staff of many inpatient settings do not routinely utilize these strategies. Surveying staff regarding their perception of programatic and organizational needs is proposed as a valuable first step for selecting behavioral strategies to be introduced in these settings. Goldfried and D'Zurilla (1969) developed a behavioral assessment survey that is especially useful for identifying staff needs vis-ri-vis behavioral rehabilitation. Using these strategies, survey questions addressed five problem areas: Administrative, Staff, Patient, Resource, and Programatic. Results using this survey with 40 clinicians on the extended care unit of a state hospital showed that staff members had greatest concern with the Patient Problem Area (i.e., aversive patient behaviors that are not sufficiently addressed by treatment plans). Further analyses showed staff members were interested in addressing Patient concerns using incentive procedures. The needs assessment in this study not only provided useful information that might be generalized to other treatment settings, but also showcased a reliable survey approach that program developers might implement prior to designing training curricula for behaviorally naive staff in inpatient settings.
Behaviorally-based treatments, when used with medication management, significantly enhance the quality of care for many severely mentally ill adults. The effects of various behavioral strategies have been repeatedly validated on this population including social skills training (Bellack, Hersen,