Monitoring outcomes from intake to termination: A suggested new symptom and progress monitoring program for Bridgehaven Mental Health Services

Abstract

In a doctoral clinical psychology program, students are frequently challenged to learn and implement new skills to improve the lives of their clients. Conducting a program evaluation, from beginning to end, is one such example. This article describes the experience of its authors in completing a program evaluation for a local agency in Louisville, KY as a class project. The project resulted in a proposed procedure to monitor therapeutic outcomes of the agency’s clients (the agency refers to them as “members”). The authors discuss the class process, how they decided on a topic for the project, the use of monitoring outcomes in community mental health settings, why monitoring outcomes is so important, and the new proposed outcome assessment procedure, limitations, and future directions. Free measures were selected to meet the perceived needs of the agency and were presented to the staff in a final presentation. Finally, the authors examined their overall experience regarding participation in the project.

Keywords:

• outcome assessment
• program evaluation
• therapeutic outcomes