Doing More With Less": Optimizing Psychotherapeutic Services in the Mental Health System

Psychotherapy is one of the cornerstones of mental health services. It is provided by psychiatrist, psychologists and psychiatric social worker in both hospital and out-patient services, and is assumed to require massive manpower and training inputs. Internationally, the clinical outcomes of routine mental health services are rarely recorded or reported. However, a rough estimation is that half (40-60%) of all psychotherapies have a favorable clinical outcome. Recently (Clark et al, 2017), the English Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) Program, which delivers psychotherapies to more than 537 000 patients in the UK each year, indicated that 44% of the patients recovered, and 62%- improved. Consistent with a causal model, most organizational factors also predicted between-year changes in outcome, together accounting for 33% of variance in reliable improvement and 22% for reliable recovery. The proposed study aims at dramatically improving the yield of psychotherapies in the Mental Health Services by combining monitoring and patient-therapist matching strategies. The first will be achieved by implementing Routine Outcome Monitoring (ROM), and the second- by applying a patient-therapist match-re-match procedure during psychotherapy