Outcomes of beginning trainee therapists in an outpatient community clinic

Aims This study describes the outcomes of clients treated by therapists in their first placement who were undergoing training in a range of humanistic and other relational approaches: Transactional Analysis, Gestalt, Integrative, Humanistic, Person Centred and Counselling Psychology. Method All clients seen by 179 trainee therapists over a 2-year period in a community clinic were asked to complete standard outcome measures including the General Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation-10 (CORE-10) and Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) before each session. Findings Clients (N = 558) showed large, statistically significant improvement on all of these outcome measures, indicating substantial improvement in symptoms of depression, anxiety, general symptom intensity and post-traumatic stress, respectively (all p < .01). Across the outcome measures, the following percentages of clients with scores in the clinical range at baseline experienced reliable improvement/reliable and clinically significant improvement: 79.9%/38.9% PHQ-9, 61.6%/54.8% GAD-7, 59.1%/48.9% CORE-10 and 41.6%/33.3% IES. There were no differences between therapeutic approaches. Discussion Trainee therapists in this community clinic tended to have large, statistically reliable and clinically significant effects on their clients. The sizes of effects were similar to those achieved by therapists in the British National Health Service (NHS), albeit involving therapies and client populations that were not fully comparable.