This report was available on the Raranga Whatumanawa website which is no longer available. A hard copy of this report was among the documents transferred from MSD in March 2011.

This is one of a series of reports produced by Raranga Whatumanawa (The weaving of the heart patterns), a research project undertaken by the Psychology Clinic at Massey University, in conjunction with the Psychology Centre in Hamilton, to investigate the mental health assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes resulting from sexual abuse. The research was funded by the Accident Compensation Corporation of New Zealand (ACC) and contributes to the development of useable national practice guidelines. This particular report presents the findings of a nationwide survey of ACC Sensitive Claims practitioners to gain a baseline understanding of current practice regarding practitioners' measurement of therapeutic progress for mental injury resulting from sexual abuse/assault. The research had four aims: to establish what outcome measures practitioners utilise to evaluate the effectiveness of therapy; whether practitioners use non-standardised measures and/or other outcome evaluation processes or systems to measure therapeutic progress; to establish whether practitioners obtain consumer feedback about their services; and to assess practitioners' willingness to implement standardised therapeutic progress measures. Of the 695 practitioners to whom the survey was distributed, 166 responded. Findings show that practitioners make use of a wide range of measures and techniques to monitor client progress. An unexpected finding was the use of subjective judgements and unstructured methods to monitor change and outcome, which, the authors argue, is not supported in the research literature. Several practitioners indicated that they did not actively seek client feedback regarding services and were more likely to interpret client actions, i.e. client not returning for therapy. Practitioners' responses indicated that they had concerns about the idea of using standardised measures to monitor progress and outcomes. These concerns included viewing measurement as not being client-friendly, irrelevant from a theoretical standpoint, and that numbers were inadequate to reflect changes for clients. One third of respondents indicated that they were not willing to use any standardised measures. Contrary to this, some practitioners expressed a willingness to implement actuarial measures of client outcomes into their practice, so long as these had relevant psychometric qualities, were relevant to the New Zealand cultural context, and particularly if formal training was made available. A number of the study's limitations are discussed. Please do not cite or quote this report without permission.

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Technical report 11