The Use of the Internet to Train Clinicians to Implement Psychological Treatments.

Empirically-supported psychological treatments have been developed for a range of psychiatric disorders. If patients are to benefit from these treatments there is a need to develop effective and efficient means of training clinicians to deliver them. A programme of education research is proposed. The primary aim of this research is to evaluate the use of the internet to help clinicians acquire the knowledge and skills required to implement psychological treatments. Two uses of the intern et will be studied. The first (internet-enhanced training) involves trainees being provided with access to a specially designed clinically-rich website which provides extensive information on the psychological treatment together with multiple acted illustrations of its key procedures. Access to the website is followed by an enhanced form of case supervision that makes extensive reference to the website. The second form of training involves access to the website alone with no case supervision ( internet-only training ). This form of training has the potential to be highly disseminable. The effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of these two new forms of training will be compared with that of conventional training (a two-day training workshop followed by case supervision) in a randomised controlled education trial that will employ new measures of clinical competence.