Treatment Planning By Supertherapists

Let us start with the following 10 inquiries:

1. What is Treatment Planning?
2. How do you currently think about Treatment Planning?
3. What does Treatment Planning mean to you?
4. What comes to mind when you hear or say the term “Treatment Planning”?
5. What does the term “Treatment Planning” evoke for you?
6. What are your current best practices regarding Treatment Planning?
7. How satisfied are you with the current state of affairs when it comes to Treatment Planning?
8. How successful have your Treatment Planning practices been for your clients?
9. What will it take to make a major change in this area?
10. What does it take to implement such a change?

Supertherapists use principles to guide them. Effective Treatment Planning is based on principles. Below are five principles that Supertherapists use to guide their treatment plans.

Treatment Planning: The 5 Principles:

1. Team Approach: Supertherapists know that it takes a village. They know that each member of the treatment team has a role. They know that it is not about degree or background; rather it is about working together to do the best with, for, and by their patients.[1]
2. Collaboration: Supertherapists know that fresh eyes make a difference. They also know that their best collaborator is their patient. And they know that the best way to have a successful treatment plan is to make their patient their chief collaborator.[2]
3. Framework: Supertherapists use and rely on a framework. They are effective and efficient because they build a framework and then allow the framework to build their work. In other words, they do not need to be thinking about how to make the same decision each time they have to make it. In this vein, a framework that becomes handy for them when it comes to formulating and implementing an effective treatment plan is the bio-psycho-social-cultural formulation.[3]
4. Guidance: Supertherapists use principles to guide them. They use a framework to build their work upon. And they consistently rely on patient feedback to adjust accordingly. Supertherapists do not just assume and then act. Rather, they check what they think with their patients and then act accordingly. In other words, consulting with their patients is their primary guiding principle.[4]
5. Patient-Centered: Supertherapists stand on the shoulders of clinicians like Carl Rogers, who is one of the founders of the humanistic approach in psychology, one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research, and is considered the most influential psychotherapist in history, by some standards, and even more influential than Sigmund Freud, in this regard. Patient-centered care is one of Rogers’s best gifts to Supertherapists, who, in turn, use it as another key guiding principle for their treatment planning and their work, in general.[5]

Which of the above 5 principles would you like to implement in your practice?

Stay tuned for additional insights into how Supertherapists function. Maybe you are already one of them, and you are finding all this reading rather satisfying.

Regardless, as you wait for the next article in this series, feel free to join us for one of our 12 series.

1. Neuroanatomy Made Simple
2. Addiction Mental Health
3. Spiritual Tools for Clinical Outcomes
4. Geriatric Mental Health
5. Ethics, Law, and Mental Health Series
6. Speed Reading for Clinicians
7. Medical First Aid for Clinicians
8. Super Memory Skills for Clinicians
9. Research Week for Clinicians
10. Optimal Aging Series
11. Child and Adolescent Mental Health Series

[1] Moulder, Patricia A., Anne M. Staal, and Marjorie Grant. “Making the interdisciplinary team approach work.” Rehabilitation Nursing Journal 13.6 (1988): 338-339.

[2] Woody, Sheila R., et al. Treatment planning in psychotherapy: Taking the guesswork out of clinical care. Guilford Press, 2004.

[3] Boschen, Mark J., and Tian PS Oei. “A cognitive behavioral case formulation framework for treatment planning in anxiety disorders.” Depression and Anxiety 25.10 (2008): 811-823.

[4] Lambert, Michael J., and Kenichi Shimokawa. “Collecting client feedback.” (2016).

[5] Rathert, Cheryl, Mary D. Wyrwich, and Suzanne Austin Boren. “Patient-centered care and outcomes: a systematic review of the literature.” Medical Care Research and Review 70.4 (2013): 351-379.