Motivational Interviewing and Psychiatry: Use in Addiction Treatment, Risky Drinking and Routine Practice

Brief Action Planning in Health and Health Care: A Scoping Review

Achieving maximal health outcomes via health promotion and disease prevention requires the adoption of healthy behaviors. Brief action planning (BAP) is a method for patient self-management, health behavior change, and health coaching with potentially broad implications for and clinical applications in health and health care contexts. This scoping review presents 5 major findings about the literature on BAP: the principal geographic locations and the clinical contexts of its application, the types of research evaluations that it has undergone to date, the theoretic frameworks in which it is grounded, and the fidelity of its use in clinical practice.

Motivational interviewing: living up to its promise?

Motivational interviewing is a form of psychotherapy in which ambivalence towards an aberrant behaviour is targeted. Rather than challenge the behaviour directly, the clinician encourages the patient to devise a list of problems that are caused by the behaviour and to identify solutions. There are many trials of motivational interviewing, although it has been most studied as treatment for substance misuse. The effect sizes for motivational interviewing are small, they probably diminish over time, the trials often use multiple outcome measures and the outcomes of some very large trials have been disappointing. Large effects are occasionally reported, although these tend to be from small trials conducted by highly motivated research groups and the results tend to diminish when the trials are repeated or enlarged. Nonetheless, motivational interviewing is a well-validated approach supporting and enabling engagement in therapeutic process. It could be argued that even though it might not be as efficacious as a primary/stand-alone means of changing patients’ behaviour, it can still be highly effective when combined with other approaches or used as a conduit to a more intensive therapy.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

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DECLARATION OF INTEREST

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A Program Module to Supplement the Clinical Psychiatry Rotation for Physician Assistant Students

A recent blog article aimed at prospective physician assistants (PAs) identified psychiatry as a series of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, diagnoses supplemented by empathy and medication. It suggested that there were ample opportunities for PAs to practice psychiatry, although a recent survey showed that only 1% of PA graduates were employed in psychiatric clinical practices. While this is only one perspective, it suggests that PAs' understanding of psychiatric practice is limited by the patient population they see during their clinical rotations as students. A broad systematically organized clinical psychiatry module with clinical preceptor direction could provide a more informed knowledge base and more interest in the field.