09/12/2024
Interesting perspective 🤔
I normally find comfort zone in the Bottom-up processes lately, but it's nice to return to my roots 🧠
👉What is an ‘OUTCOME’ in therapy?👈
A therapeutic outcome in healthcare refers to the measurable improvement in a patient's health status resulting from a treatment or intervention.
Firstly, an outcome depends on the expectation of a chosen therapy and how it will make a person feel during and afterwards. A positive therapeutic outcome is where the client feels benefit. A negative therapeutic outcome is where they don’t feel better or even feel worse afterwards.
An outcome is based on a therapeutic alliance and a shared decision-making process. The greater the confidence that a client has in your capabilities, how well you communicate with that client and how confident you are will all enhance a positive therapeutic outcome. From this point of view, you could have a really off day and feel that you’ve not done anywhere close to your best work, but the client goes away singing your praises simply because they believed in you and your capabilities. Regardless of how you felt your work was, the client still had a positive therapeutic outcome.
Take any 10 different therapies with their different names and claims on how they are believed to work. At the end of the treatment, give each 10 clients the same questionnaire about the therapy and how they feel afterwards. All of the 10 could have a positive therapeutic outcome.
Therefore, unfortunately, outcomes tell you nothing about how a therapy works or that it is a better therapy than another. They actually tell you more about you as the therapist, your confidence, your ability to communicate, your presentation, how warm and welcoming your treatment space is and even the music that you play. It can involve how you touch, which is still commnicaiton with your hands, but not the technique you use.
An outcome involves the perception of how well a therapy works and that, TBH, can often be down to a clients expectation and their belief, what marketing they have seen or read about and how well you sell your therapy to them.
An outcome can also be like that amazing looking cake in the shop window with the most amazing decoration and frosting with lots of testimonials about how great it was and how they can't wait to buy another highly recommending said cake. Add whatever you like here to enhance the expectation. The cake could really be horrible but if expectations are high, you can still get a positive therapeutic outcome.
Lastly, outcomes can be viewed as supportive evidence that skill, qualifications, training and experience are not as important, or even necessary, as long as someone can build trust and be a good communicator. It suggests that anyone can learn something to provide a positive therapeutic outcome and as such questions and devalues the entire profession. Additionally - if the quality of an outcome doesn’t involve how a therapy is suggested to work, it supports the lack of evidence the profession, and especially the specific applied intervention that was used, actually has. Simply, a therapeutic outcome actually questions the value of modalities and branded therapies.
However, outcomes are great to take note of these are the subjective experiences your client has. A client may have strong positive therapeutic outcome from one therapy that is not the same outcome for a different client.
An outcome does not guarantee that a therapy is proven to work better than any other as the outcome is based on client expectations and their perception of symptom improvement.
Outcomes are a top-down perception and not a bottom-up process.
Train with In-Touch Education. 😀
