Understanding the Landscape of Behavioral Health Pre-service Training to Inform Evidence-Based Intervention Implementation

Abstract

Reports on the behavioral health workforce highlight the need to enhance evidence-based capacity; evidence-based interventions incorporated into pre-service graduate curricula (coursework and fieldwork) are needed to meet this goal. Improving educational practices across pre-service settings will require understanding of and careful attention to the contextual factors that exert pressure on curricula. The authors believe efforts to change educational practices can be enhanced by application of implementation science principles. This Open Forum delineates the key contextual factors that influence pre-service education, highlights gaps in the literature, and proposes an agenda for future research at the intersection of behavioral health workforce development and implementation science.

What Motivates Mental Health Clinicians-in-Training to Implement Evidence-Based Assessment? A Survey of Social Work Trainees

“…Most prior implementation science studies have accounted for smaller proportions of outcome variance. For example, a previous study examining the relative contribution of individual and organizational factors to therapist use of EBP explained about 23% of the variance (Beidas et al, 2015).…”

“…Most efforts to strengthen the use of EBA in the mental health workforce have focused on clinicians already in practice (Jensen-Doss, 2011). A promising alternative is to target clinical trainees before they are practicing independently (Becker-Haimes et al, 2018;Huey, 2002;Stanhope, Tuchman, & Sinclair, 2011). Trainees tend to be more responsive to training than are practicing clinicians, who often are less flexible in regard to new practices (Donaldson, 2015;Tennille, Solomon, Brusilovskiy, & Mandell 2016).…”

“…It also may be more feasible to reach clinicians while they are still in training, before they are spread across provider organizations. Many experts agree on the potential of pre-service implementation strategies (Becker-Haimes et al, 2018;Burns et al, 2012;Huey, 2002;Stanhope et al, 2011), although few have been studied. A small literature has shown that pre-service training increases EBP skills to a larger extent than in-service trainings do (Donaldson, 2015;Santa Maria, Markham, Crandall, & Guilamo-Ramos, 2017).…”

“…The study advances implementation science by identifying targets for pre-service implementation strategies i.e. strategies used while clinicians are still in training (Becker-Haimes et al, 2018) to increase mental health trainees' intentions to use EBA.…”

Therapist training in evidence‐based interventions for mental health: A systematic review of training approaches and outcomes.

“… The term EBI is used rather than evidence‐based practice (EBP), as EBP has multiple definitions, and EBI is a more precise term that has begun to be used to describe treatments with empirical support (e.g., Aarons et al, ; Becker‐Haimes et al, ). …”