> Research > Producing more Evidence (for BADth Members)

Producing more Evidence

(for BADth Members)
As part of the review of health and social care across the UK, only narratives that include data will be accepted as evidence. For this reason BADth initiated two awards to encourage our membership to start producing this material, The BADth Case Study Award and the BADth Poster Award.

Watch out for five Dramatherapy case studies in the AHP QUICK GUIDES. Unfortunately, it has been necessary to delay the publication of these due to the pandemic.

BADth Case Study Award

Surrey based Dramatherapist Roya Hamid won the first award in October 2020 for evidencing her work.You can download her case study by following the link below.

Here is what the Judges said:
 
 

BADth Poster Award

The poster competition was won by Rose Sadowski whose scientific poster was on her work with people who are struggling with an eating disorder. Her poster can be seen HERE. Rose received a prize in the form of an iPad to help develop her work and her skills.

How to Produce Meaningful Evidence

As part of the review of health and social care across the UK, only narratives that include data will be accepted as evidence. For this reason BADth initiated two awards to encourage our membership to start producing this material.

The Rules to Case Studies
Making Your Case Study Standout

Collecting Data

From the moment you begin working within a new project, age group or population we want to support you to detail your work. You can find a link to Louise Combes’ webinar, explaining how to fill in the case study template HERE

Measuring Change as a Best Practice Therapist

Asking people at the start and end of therapy the same questions can show change. This is called outcome data and is how funders justify dramatherapy.

As therapists we all measure the ebb and flow of clients’ engagement within sessions in order to plan our clients’ journey through therapy. There are a number of outcome measures we can use to do this and these can be client specific. They can be administrated by the therapist or they can be self-reported. THE CAT SRS is an outcome measure which is scored by the therapist and has been developed for all Arts Therapies by Dr Simon Hackett. If you would like to use this, please ask permission fromSimon.Hackett@CNTW.nhs.uk

It can be helpful if attending staff also complete the CAT separately so that you can check your inter-reliability score. Information on interrelated reliability and the ‘Leeds reliable change indicator can be found here: https://dclinpsych.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/26/2018/09/Manual-for-Leeds-RCI-CSC-calculators.pdf. The idea is that all measurement is unreliable to some extent and that a difference between two scores from an individual could be due to the measurement error rather than any other reason in assessing the outcome of therapy.

Measuring Change to collect Meaningful Outcome Data

There are two rules for outcome data:

  • If your outcome data collection is to be taken seriously it needs to be independent of you – so collect the changes that others notice: staff, the service user and/or their families is all useful.
  • The data needs to be validated - whilst it tempting to invent outcomes that specifically deal with the primary reason for you being employed, it is much better to collect data in a way that has been previously tested and other professions consider reliable.

A good example is https://www.corc.uk.net/outcome-experience-measures/strengths-and-difficulties-questionnaire/ - this has been used for many years across schools and is well designed to be completed independently by clients, staff and parents. However, members are telling us it is out of date and it is only suitable for school use.

New Recommended Outcome Measures

We currently recommend using the EQ-5D as a recent and well researched, free to use outcome measurement.

Please let us know your experience of using this. If you would like to recommend alternatives, please review this document from the AHP framework and get in touch with us: https://www.rcslt.org/-/media/docs/selecting-outcome-measures.pdf?la=en&hash=12ECB2CFDA0B2EFB1979E592A383D24E792AB9DD

We welcome feedback - please email research@badth.org.uk if you have any comments or questions.