Audit writing

Order Description

PS71050A – Clinical Research Design and Analysis

Coursework

Background
A sample of 298 individuals who had been referred for individual high-intensity psychological treatment for moderate levels of depression from a range of NHS and private services in the area were interviewed immediately prior to treatment and immediately after treatment on a range of demographic, social and treatment-related variables. None of the participants received anti-depressant drugs over the survey period. Service managers, government health policy experts and health workers were keen to address three broad areas:

• Client profile: what are the socio-demographic characteristics of individuals accessing treatment services for depression in this area?
• The treatment process: how long did individuals wait for treatment, how many sessions did they attend, and how satisfied with treatment were they?
• Treatment outcomes: how effective are the different service types and therapeutic approaches in treating depression and improving general well-being?

Standarts

The government authority considered the following standards when examining the findings (derived from the NICE guidelines for treatment of depression):
• A person who is assessed as requiring treatment for depression should not wait longer than 18 weeks from the time at which the initial referral is received to the time that treatment starts.
• Individuals receiving high intensity individual therapy for moderate-high levels of depression should receive 16-20 therapy sessions in total.
• Individuals should report satisfaction with treatment received, and should have a positive therapeutic alliance with their therapist.
• A benchmark of 50% of individuals recovering from depression using the clinical cutoff on the screening tool (the CES-D; see below).
• Individuals should show significant improvement on other relevant benchmarks (self-esteem and life satisfaction in the case of depression).

Your task, as part of a team of consultant clinical psychologists, is to provide a report on this audit for service managers, government health policy experts and health workers. More specifically, your role on the team is to analyse the data and synthesise the key findings of the audit. You have been provided with a file that contains the data for this audit (edited from a real NHS dataset). You can find more detail on the dataset below and find the file itself on learn.gold.
Your report should contain the following sections:
• A 250 word executive summary of the findings (ie an abstract)
• A results section presenting and summarising the key findings in relation to the broad areas and standards mentioned above
• A recommendations section, highlighting the key results and providing some basic recommendations for the target audience on the basis of the findings
• Please do not include an appendix with detailed output – you must decide what is important enough to be presented in the main body of the results section
(nb. other members of the consultancy team will be handling the other parts of a typical audit report, including the literature review, method etc.).

The Dataset

Below is a brief overview of the variables in the dataset (see the data file itself for coding etc):

Id – participant iD
gender
age
SES – income band
ethnicity
service – type of service attended i.e. NHS or private
waitlist– waiting time before treatment after initial referral (in weeks)
therapy – type of therapy received
sessions – number of therapy sessions received
life – global life satisfaction measured after treatment (higher scores indicate higher satisfaction)
esteem – self-esteem measured after treatment (higher scores indicate higher esteem)
satis – satisfied with treatment, measured post treatment (yes/no response)
ces_pre – Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale measured before treatment (scores vary from 0-60, with higher scores indicating higher levels of depression; scores of 16 and above are used as a cutoff to indicate a diagnosis of depression)
ces_post – as above, but measured post treatment
TA –therapeutic alliance measured post treatment i.e. patient score (higher scores indicate a stronger alliance with the therapist; a score of 15 or above is classed as a positive therapeutic alliance)

Getting Started
Hint #1: There is no single correct way to report and present the data; feel free to present and summarise the data in the way you think best brings to light the key findings.
Hint #2: Remember that at least some of your target audience will not be psychologists or statisticians (i.e. managers, government officials etc.), so avoid jargon and the presentation of complex statistics in the body of the results section; the key skill in preparing reports for educated laypeople is presenting the findings simply, yet accurately (see the RDA lecture slides for help).

See the course learn.gold page for resources. In particular, see the slides for the lecture on Service Auditing and Evaluation in week 8 and presenting data/reports in week 10, and the example audit reports on learn.gold for week 8. You will also be able to find many examples of service audits by searching online. This coursework may also draw upon your knowledge of statistics, so the stats resources on learn.gold and relevant stats textbooks may also be useful. An example student report from last year is also available on learn.gold.

Important requirements
The coursework is due on Friday 13th February 2015.
• Please put your candidate number on the front page (not your name).
• Maximum 3000 words.
• If used, references must be given in APA format at the conclusion of the report.
• Do not cut and paste, or copy-type, material from other sources. This coursework must be entirely your own work, and plagiarism software will be used to detect work which is not your own.
• An electronic copy of the report will need to be submitted via the learn.gold course site. A link will be provided on the learn.gold page closer to the deadline. You do not need to submit a hard copy to the psychology office.

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