Developing a European Psychotherapy Consortium (EPoC): Towards Adopting a Single-Item Self-Report Outcome Measure...

Area of Science:

• Psychotherapy research
• Clinical psychology
• Health services research

Background:

• Practice-based evidence complements evidence-based psychological therapies by using routine care data.
• Routine assessments support clinical decisions and generate practice-based data for patients, clinicians, and researchers.
• This data collection addresses needs like routine outcome monitoring and understanding therapist impact on outcomes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe an initiative by the European Chapter of the Society for Psychotherapy Research to form a data-collecting consortium.
• To address the challenge of data heterogeneity in psychological therapy research.
• To develop a standardized approach for collecting practice-based evidence.

Main Methods:

• A survey was conducted among members to identify challenges in creating a common dataset.
• The survey revealed significant heterogeneity in outcome measures used (e.g., 87 different pre-post outcomes).
• The initial stage focused on identifying a single-item measure, the Emotional and Psychological Outcome (EPO-1), and its translation.

Main Results:

• Survey results highlighted the heterogeneity of measures as a primary obstacle.
• A single-item measure, the Emotional and Psychological Outcome (EPO-1), was identified.
• The EPO-1 measure underwent translation into multiple European languages.

Conclusions:

• The first stage of the project successfully identified a common measure and initiated its translation.
• Future potential includes developing procedures for outcome measure crosswalks.
• A task force is proposed to guide future data collection and the implementation of shared common measures.