As needed, the CPA Board of Directors convenes task forces to explore various issues affecting the science, practice and education of psychology. View these pages to find out more information on CPA's current task forces, as well as task forces that were convened in the past.
EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICE TASK FORCE
2011-2012 Committee
Co-Chairs |
David Dozois |
Members |
Lynn Alden: Professor, University of British Columbia, Vancouver Note: Considerable expertise from a variety of research, practice, knowledge-translation, consumer and community perspectives is represented among the task force members. Interestingly, most of the academics on the committee also have a small private practice. There is also good representation from different theoretical orientations, including interpersonal, emotion-focused, cognitive-behavioural and psychodynamic perspectives. |
Objectives
The purpose of this task force is to operationalize what constitutes evidence-based practice in psychology, to make recommendations about how psychologists can best integrate evidence into practice to better inform patient care and to suggest strategies for dissemination.
Progress to Date
By the time of the 2011 fall CPA Board meetings, the task force will have held 3 teleconferences (September 19th, October 19th and one scheduled for November 16th).
The Task Force will limit its consideration to evidence-based practice as it relates to psychological treatment (i.e., mental health delivery to adults and youth) as provided by psychologists. Therefore, other organizational, community, or educational applications of evidence-based practice by psychologists are outside the scope of this task force.
At the first teleconference, the members discussed both the “what” and the “how” of the proposed work plan. We willinitially need to come to some consensus on what we refer to as evidence and then generate an operational definition of what is EBP. Rather than launching a literature review pertaining to the level of support that various psychotherapies have for different disorders, the task force members have decided to define evidence, develop “CPA’s hierarchy” of evidence, and make recommendations regarding how psychologists can best utilize the evidence. A review would have a short shelf-life and is repetitious with what has already been advanced. Like a good theory (which is useful not because it is right but provides a heuristic which generates more ideas and research) this approach will be more likely to stimulate ongoing dialogue. This new direction will provide an important contribution to the literature (rather than increasing competition among therapeutic orientations) and has greater potential to be adopted and utilized than a review of outcome trials. One idea is to model how one would apply evidence-based practice using composite vignettes (in fact, one of the deliverables might be something akin to the CPA Code Ethics for Psychologists – a set of principles rather than a prescriptive document of evidence based practice). We also intend to develop a guide for consumers to help them determine if the psychological treatments that they are pursuing are evidence-based (e.g., your therapist should know the research literature, should collect data ongoing in treatment, etc.). We are using Dropbox to share articles and other information among task force members.
At the October teleconference, discussion focused on defining evidence and evidence-based practice. I was charged with the task of developing a definition of evidence-based practice for the task force to consider and respond to. Peter, Martin and John were going to review different hierarchies of evidence from the research and practice literatures for discussion and consideration at the November teleconference.
After defining evidence and evidence-based practice, sub-committees will be established to move forward on the various components of the project. We aim to have drafts of documents that summarize the work of the task force by summer, 2012.