Our Client: Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health
Ontario Shores Centre for Mental Health Sciences (Ontario Shores) is a public hospital in Whitby, Ontario. It provides a range of specialized assessment and treatment services to those living with complex and serious mental illness and works to raise awareness of mental illness, educate healthcare practitioners, and train the next generation of mental health care specialists.
Ontario Shores is strongly committed to expanding the knowledge and skills of its employees. The centre’s clinicians, nurses, and other employees have been coming to OISE CPL for more than three years to participate in OISE CPL intensive Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) Fundamental Skills courses.
The Goal:
Ontario Shores wanted to give a greater number of employees more CBT training opportunities and help them advance their practice further by instituting case consultation services for every trained individual.
The Participants:
Clinicians, nurses, and other employees at Ontario Shores.
The Solution:
To begin, OISE CPL provided fundamental skills in CBT onsite at Ontario Shores’ location in Whitby (rather than onsite at OISE CPL).
Then, as part of our needs analysis and as a result of our ongoing, collaborative relationship with Ontario Shores, we proposed Case Consultation, “a deliberation of two or more health care professionals about diagnosis or treatment in a particular case,1” and developed a unique customized Case Consultation service based on a supervisory model.
Following fundamental skills training, an associate engaged in dedicated one-on-one consultation sessions with practicing clinicians to review cases and provide ongoing consultation.
The Program:
CBT Fundamental skills training engaged groups of approximately 25 employees at a time and involved learning about cognitive behaviour therapy in a structured setting that focuses on theoretical understanding, skill development and application. The training included:
- Learning how to conceptualize client challenges for interventions to be based on a clinical formulation.
- Learning cognitive behavioural interventions in a step-by-step manner, with structured skills practice that break down complex interventions into specific and concrete skills.
Impact:
The program resulted in a noted increase in the trained employees’ confidence and expertise in practicing CBT. And, of course, it also had a positive impact on the Ontario Shores’ patients who experienced the effective, evidence-based therapy.
1 https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/consultation
