Training Clinicians to Tailor Interventions Posted on June 22, 2008 Luis H. Zayas (bio) talks about the fidelity of interventions in clinical practice.

Every day therapists, whether they're using so-called evidence-based practices or non-evidence-based practices, constantly tailoring. Every day they're doing that, and in fact we think that the adaptation and tailoring process is much more rampant in youth than we give it credit for.

But the interesting thing about tailoring, if we think about evidence-based approaches, such as those that we're talking about at this conference, the evidence-based interventions are tailored through the clinician's clinical judgment, the provider's clinical judgment. They know the agency. They know the families. They know this community well, we assume, and so they are doing the tailoring, but they're using clinical judgment. And you're right that every day in America clinicians are constantly tailoring interventions for their clients.

Not necessarily doing research. That's also one of the problems, the problem of fidelity of an intervention. We believe in this idea that in order to make the intervention work, you've got to be faithful to its core elements, its structure, whatever the case might be, and how do we take that fidelity and make it fit a particular circumstance? And so we need to train clinicians to do the tailoring, but to do it with good, sound, empirical knowledge behind it rather than just off the cuff.

A conference such as ours is really intended, as we move towards elevating the concepts and the methods to do the adaptations and tailoring, we hope that that way we're able to give clinicians, providers, practitioners something that they can work from when they're doing the day-to-day treatment of their clients.

« Back to Article