Teaching Psychotherapy Skills to Inexperienced Psychiatry Trainees Using the Conversational Model

A teaching package of three videotapes with accompanying written material was developed to provide introductory teaching in the Conversational Model of psychotherapy. In previous research, conducted within the environment of a teaching hospital, we showed this teaching package to be effective in imparting key skills within the model. However, it has been suggested that this success may have been due partly to our use of a particularly favorable training environment, i.e., the use of our own trainees in a university teaching hospital. Here we report on a comparable training exercise conducted in nonteaching hospitals, and compare the results with those of the earlier study. In both situations the teaching package proved to be effective in imparting the appropriate skills.