Effectiveness of a professional development training program in increasing knowledge of mental health clinicians specializing in early psychosis

Aim For early psychosis services to be effective, it is essential to have staff that are trained in evidence-based interventions in this area. In this paper, we report on research undertaken by The Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre's Statewide Services (ESW) team. The focus was on assessing knowledge acquisition in early psychosis clinicians that had attended ESW's specialist training. Methods Between October 2012 and October 2017, data were collected from a large cohort of clinicians that had attended 46 ESW workshops covering topics identified in international guidelines as key components of early psychosis service provision. Participants were asked to complete between 3 and 11 pre- and post-workshop short answer and/or multiple choice questions that related to learning outcomes for the workshop. The percentage of correct responses before and after the workshop was compared for each participant, with a cumulative measure taken to provide information regarding knowledge acquisition across each workshop. Results Participant compliance was high (89.7%) with 962 completed questionnaires being collected from 1073 attendees across the workshops. Results showed that the ESW training led to a statistically significant increase in clinician knowledge from pre-training scores of 47.2% correct, to 83.5% correct answers at the conclusion of training (pre M = 47.2%, SD = 28.8; post M = 83.5%, SD = 23.7; t[890] = -35.66, P < 0.001). Conclusions Training that utilized adult learning principles had a strong focus on evidence-based interventions, and used clinical examples to embed core principles, led to a statistically significant increase in early intervention clinician knowledge.