Ensuring Quality in Psychological Support-Foundational Helping Skills

Summary

There is lack of feasible and effective curricula that can rapidly be taught on basic mental health and psychosocial helping skills. Through the World Health Organization Ensuring Quality in Psychological Support initiative, a curriculum has been developed focusing on common factors in mental health and psychosocial support, such as verbal and nonverbal communication skills, empathy, rapport building, and promoting hope and expectancy of change. To minimize training burden and maximize effectiveness, this has been designed as a competency-based training wherein target competencies are evaluated throughout the training so that it can tailored to trainees preexisting skills, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach to the training. The training duration and content is modular and flexible, with approximately 16 hours of modules content. The investigator's goal is to conduct a mixed-methods evaluation of the foundational helping skills program. In three countries, Nepal, Peru, and Uganda, two trainers (total n=6 across countries) and 36 service providers (total n=108 across countries) without prior training in mental health and psychosocial support skills will receive the training. Their competency in foundational helping skills will be evaluated prior to training using an objective structured clinical examination approach with standardized role plays using trained raters and actor (i.e., standardized clients). Role play ratings will be made using the ENhancing Assessment of Common Therapeutic factors. In addition, trainees knowledge and perceived self-efficacy in foundational helping skills will be evaluated pre- and post-training. Trainers and trainees will also participate in qualitative interviews regarding feasibility, acceptability, and perceived benefit of the foundational helping skills program. A mixed methods evaluation of the foundational helping skills curriculum will help to inform further revision of the materials on the Ensuring Quality in Psychological Support platform. Determination of the change in skills, knowledge, and self-efficacy will identify effective components of the platform and areas for further refinement. Ultimately, an effective training program in foundational helping skills will contribute to improved health, psychological, and social services around the world.

Conditions

• Psychological Distress

Interventions

OTHER

Foundational Helping Skills

Each site will implement three waves of Foundational Helping Skills training. Each training will include 12 trainees each, with a minimum of 2 trainers per training. Each site will include pre and post research days, where they will collect primary and secondary outcomes with support from research staff (trained raters, actors, and qualitative researcher). Each site will qualitatively assess the training after the first wave to identify any areas for modification, and after the second and third waves to develop recommendations for future implementation.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• World Health Organization

  collaborator OTHER

• Transcultural Psychosocial Organization Nepal

  collaborator OTHER

• Socios En Salud Sucursal, Peru

  collaborator OTHER

• HealthRight International

  collaborator UNKNOWN

• George Washington University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Alison Schafer, PhD · World Health Organization

Study Design

Allocation

NA

Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Masking

NONE

Model

SINGLE_GROUP

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2020-10-20

Primary Completion

2021-01-31

Completion

2021-01-31

Countries

• Nepal
• Peru
• Uganda

Study Locations