ACAT Email Newsletter 1 - April 2010

With best wishes

Mark Westacott

• nine month Skills Certificate course in Lincolnshire Mental Health Foundation Trust will be run by Steve Potter and Jackie Withers. This will not be accredited by Sheffield Hallam University.
• A second Forensic CAT Skills course (SHU) has been postponed and is now planned for 2011

• A new ACAT/SHU CAT East Practitioner Training course has been agreed. This will commence in Norwich in January 2011, the course director is Jackie Baker.
• The planned 2010 practitioner training in Somerset is postponed until 2011

CAT Skills course are now well established and at the last Training Committee there was a discussion about how CAT Skills trainees could be supported during training. It was proposed that a new ‘Trainee CAT Skills’ Membership would be established for those courses accredited by Sheffield Hallam University (SHU). This would entitle the trainee access to the online library facilities along with inclusion in the ACAT community. The other changes proposed were as follows:

• Courses currently pay £50 per trainee fee to SHU. Courses will pay an additional fee of £40 to ACAT, totalling £90 per trainee for the year of the course.
• After the first year, trainees would pay this fee personally until they have been accredited.
• After accreditation they would have the option of joining ACAT as a Friend at a cost of £40 per year per individual. The benefits include access to the library, to local CAT interest groups and CPD events as well as copies of Reformulation.

The proposed changes now need to be ratified at the forthcoming AGM and incorporated into the organisation’s subsidiary rules.

Liz McCormick, guest speaker at the July conference, with Shirley Akgun, Chair of the Exam Board

Professor Paul Gilbert is our invited speaker on Friday. He is the head of the Research Unit as well as Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Derby. After years of exploring the processes underpinning shame and its role in a variety of psychopathologies, his current research is exploring the neurophysiology and therapeutic effectiveness of compassion focused therapy.

Professor Vasu Reddy is Professor of Developmental and Cultural Psychology at the University of Portsmouth and speaks on Saturday. She writes “I am interested in the origins and development of social cognition, mainly in young infants. For twenty years now I have been exploring the role of understanding, focusing on the everyday, ordinary engagements (such as teasing and joking and showing-off or feeling shy) which often tend to get ignored in mainstream theories. This interest in engagement as the route to understanding has led me to questions about the nature and influence of cultural engagements on social understanding. I am currently intrigued – in relation to infants, in relation to adults and indeed in relation to psychologists – how engagement must constantly either alternate or somehow integrate with disengagement.”

The conference also includes experts from within CAT (Elizabeth McCormick – author of ‘Change for the Better’, Annie Nehmad and Anna Jellema. Most importantly, we have allowed plenty of space for getting together in workshops and small groups in order to further develop our own healthy hearts and minds.

Call for research posters

We would like to encourage poster presentations of research work or audit in CAT at the conference and there will be a small prize for the best conference poster.

Work that focuses on the views of service users will be most welcome. If you have an idea for a poster presentation of your research or audit project then please contact Alison Jenaway or Jackie Baker.

ACAT promotes and supports a number of events aimed at ACAT members and those interested in Cognitive Analytic Therapy. Some of the events are specifically targeted to meet the needs of practising CAT therapists; others are more wide-ranging in subject but may still be useful to CAT therapists or others with a general interest in psychotherapy. Jessie Emilion has taken the lead in promoting these nationally run CPD events and would be interested to hear from you if you have an idea that you would like to present.

Fee rates are as follows: £600/day for one ACAT funded trainer (this includes CPD and introductory training events). The training course should make a profit and have a minimum of 15 delegates. The fee is reduced to £400 each if there are two trainers. If the course ran with fewer than 15 delegates, then the fee would be £400 for one trainer.

ACAT would manage the event from booking the venue through to managing the bookings and payments.

Please email Jessie Emilion through the ACAT website with a proposal and make sure you include an email address and phone number.

As you may know, a great deal of work has gone into revising the supervisor training guidance with the hope that this will free up what had become a bottleneck in training. The new policy is currently being put on the website but these essential changes are shown below.

If you wish, it is also possible to attend the intensive relational skills in supervision training course in addition to completing a period of sitting in.

1. As is the case now, before starting training applicants will normally have completed sixteen cases, the first eight of which are those needed to qualify as a CAT Practitioner. The second eight cases over and above the original eight, whether pre or post accreditation, normally have to be supervised and signed off by either an accredited CAT supervisor or a trainee CAT supervisor and countersigned by their senior supervisor. Where an accredited CAT supervisor has not been available for reasons of geography or lack of availability for the additional eight cases the person who provided supervision must have extensive experience of CAT practice and supervision in general, or this may have been provided through well-managed peer supervision. However the prospective trainee supervisor needs to make contact with a senior supervisor by their 14th CAT case to discuss their training and development plans. The senior supervisor will provide mentoring and be responsible for the learning journey of the supervisee. They would agree to let the person sit in if this route is taken and supervise the trainees’ supervision group.
2. There are now three routes open to trainee supervisors prior to the six months of supervised practice:
   1. Undertake an intensive ‘relational skills in supervision’ course (two and a half-day residential) which is designed to achieve some of the experiential learning of the sitting in period. Where the intensive training course is chosen the trainee supervisor will normally need to contact a senior supervisor before their training starts, to plan and discuss their supervision training. The senior supervisor will provide mentoring throughout the journey and be responsible for the trainee supervisor’s training. Contact may be face to face or by phone.
   2. Present evidence of prior learning and experience equivalent to the sitting in period.
   3. Sit in with a senior supervisor for six months of weekly supervision.
3. Trainees continue to be required to supervise a group of their own for six months under the supervision of an established supervisor.
4. It is not mandatory to attend three supervisor training days but it is highly recommended. Supervisor training days will be organised by ACAT and will be open to anyone with an interest in supervision and not just trainee supervisors. If the days are not attended by the trainee supervisor they need to demonstrate in their application form and in discussion with the senior supervisor and National External Examiner how their learning needs will otherwise be fulfilled. It is not necessary to attend the three supervision days if you have completed the intensive residential course, although you may of course do both.
5. In order to improve the consistency of supervisor training nationally and also to make the role of the Vice Chair of Supervisor Training more manageable, we have created a new role of National External Examiner for Supervision. This person will approve submissions to begin supervisor training, review the progress of trainees and examine them at the end. A recommendation will then be made to the Exam Board after discussion with the Vice Chair of Supervisor Training (currently Val Fretten). For now, applications for training should still go to Val using the ACAT forms.

To speed the process and prevent misunderstandings and disappointment, please ensure that if you are thinking of applying for supervisor training that you read the policy carefully, and are accepted before you start any elements of training.

A number of the CAT Practitioner courses (PG Diplomas) are now validated by Sheffield Hallam University (SHU), and trainees are offered the opportunity to submit a research dissertation, the successful completion of which leads to the award of an MSc CAT.

Would you be interested in being included on the list of approved research supervisors for MSc candidates? To be eligible you would need to have a Masters degree or above. This is an exciting opportunity to expand the research base for CAT and for collaborative research with MSc students who are accredited CAT practitioners.

As a supervisor you will be supported in this role by the SHU MSc Co-ordinator/Link Tutor from Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) and SHU will offer supervisor development days. Supervisors will receive a fee to cover 10 hours supervision time per year.

If you are interested to be included on the list of approved supervisors please visit the website for further details and an application form. Alternatively contact Dawn Bennett ACAT/SHU liaison or James Turner (CAT practitioner and link tutor SHU) to register your interest or request further information.

A discount has been negotiated for members of ACAT for the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The Internal Journal of Relational Perspectives The discounted rate we offered is £49 / €68. That is a 20% discount off the individual subscription rate. Members of ACAT can subscribe to the journal either by contacting our customer service department or by completing the electronic order form. The contact information for our customer service department is as follows:

Taylor & Francis
325 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106

Tel: 1-800-354-1420, press 4
Fax: 215-625-8914
E-mail: customerservice@taylorandfrancis.com

If members are contacting Customer Service directly, they will need to state that they are a member of ACAT in order to receive the discounted rate. This link will also appear on the website.

Please suggest other journals that you feel would be of relevance to ACAT members and we will follow these up with the aim of negotiating further discounts.

Jason Hepple is the new Chair of the Research and Communications Committee which met for the first time last September (see Terms of Reference below). Pressing items on the agenda are the revision of the website to support the Research Support Group function (Tony Ryle has kindly agreed to be the Research Support Group Coordinator), and to improve how CAT is presented to stakeholders and the public by looking at CAT’s web presence and the production of a CAT brochure (with concise presentation of research into CAT and bibliography) and a range of leaflets addressed to potential clients, commissioners, referrers, potential trainees etc.

If you have any ideas for other ways to increase the profile of CAT please e-mail Jason

Purpose
The purpose of the Research and Communication Committee is to advise on research related to Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) and the communication of the CAT evidence-base and understanding; specifically it will:

• Offer Advice and support on research into the processes and outcomes of CAT through a network called the ‘Research Support Group’ (see below).
• Advise on the presentation of the evidence-base for CAT.
• Advise on the communication of CAT understanding to potential clients, members, external bodies and the general public.

Research Support Group
A virtual network of research advisors, coordinated by a Research Support Group Coordinator, will:

• Advise the Research and Communication Committee on applications for ACAT research grants.
• Offer support and advice to current or potential CAT researchers.
• Provide a virtual network for discussion and dialogue around CAT research.
• Maintain the research section of the ACAT website by providing an up to date list of publications (including papers and books already published, those in press and work in progress).
• Report to Council via the Research and Communication committee.

Do you know who else is involved in CAT in your region? In order to help you to build local CAT networks, regional lists can be accessed from the website. To view the listings from your geographical area log on to the website and look for ACAT members in your region. The website will show if you are included in the list – to opt in you only have to click on the ‘click here’ link. If your name does not appear it is possible that your details do not include information about your region. To update your records, go to your home page and the first paragraph will give you a link to your personal records.

This information is only available to current members, and will only show your name and an email link (if you're on email). We hope this will help you to get to know, and keep in touch with, other local ACAT Members and strengthen the local CAT presence in your area.

Reports from some regions and special interest groups appear below but this is not an exclusive list. Are you organising events for members in your region or special interest group? Get in touch and let me know what’s happening? Tell me about your CAT services or about future meetings. Email me – Maddy.Jevon@acat.me.uk I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

Anyone interested in CAT in South, Mid and West Wales is welcome to our regular meetings at Archway House, Cardiff. Our next meeting is a case presentation on Wednesday 14 April 10-12. We will also be discussing plans for a local CAT Skills Training. The following meeting will be on 14 July.

Contacts are: Clare.fisher2@wales.nhs.uk
Louise.dodd@wales.nhs.uk

Midlands CAT (MCAT) is running its first Practitioner Training for many years. The new trainees are now half way through their first year and still full of ideas, motivation to learn and enthusiasm about dialogically engaging with their clients. Tina Griffiths and Jurai Darongkamas are running most of it, with the input and support from the MCAT Practitioner Training Steering Group. Tina and Jurai can give you more details.

The first discussions about having a CAT special interest group for people working in learning disability services started over 10 years ago between Val Crowley, Phil Clayton and Ros King, and seven years ago, the group started to meet four times a year in Birmingham. There are now over 30 members and on May 28th this year, we are holding our first one-day conference on CAT in Learning Disability Services, at Birmingham University. There will be 7 presentations covering a wide range of topics (please see the events section of the ACAT web pages for details and booking as there are a few places left).

Over the years we have been meeting, the group has developed a great deal. One initial task was to explore how to adapt CAT tools for learning disability services, but gradually, through exchanging and reflecting on our experiences of implementing CAT with people with learning disabilities, their carers and with staff teams, the group has developed a sense of confidence. CAT, as a versatile yet clear approach, appears intrinsically useful for the very varied requirements of working with people who have complex needs which usually involving multiple statutory and voluntary agencies. We have produced over 20 publications on aspects of our work, (most published in Reformulation), and we continue to explore how experiences of working in learning disability services encourages the development of both CAT theory and practice. It is an exciting, energetic and productive group and open to anyone involved in learning disability services who is receiving CAT supervision. Please see the web site for details.
Julie Lloyd

Our work in running the practitioner training with an annual recruitment continued successfully last year despite concerns, on some of our parts, that the financial climate would affect recruitment. We hope to recruit again in 2010 but wait to see in the months ahead. We had twenty three new trainees starting the course in October and nineteen trainees go into the second year from the 2008-2010 cohort. Satisfaction with the course is good, as are completion rates though, as ever, it takes well into the third year for many to complete all elements of the course. We are pleased that the new accreditation partnership with Sheffield Hallam University is beginning to become embedded with no loss to our core values or methods of training. There is an increased interest by ACAT North graduates in the further two years of training offered by ACAT Nationally to achieve CAT psychotherapist status (nine have taken up a place in January 2010).

Having now trained over 200 practitioners over the years there is widespread enthusiasm for CAT with the same wide range of innovative clinical applications echoing the national picture. In this context we are glad to work side by side with neighbouring and thriving practitioner trainings in the North East, in Scotland and in the Midlands. On the past year’s evidence it is likely that CAT in the North will be active in four overlapping directions of training.

• Firstly the well established in-service practitioner training to develop individual psychotherapeutic competence in adult mental health. We are delighted to see a thriving practitioner training in the North East and a new Training in Scotland and in the Midlands.
• Secondly as evidenced by our graduates on the practitioner training, this element will increasingly include people who are applying CAT’s approach to psychotherapy to people in Forensic, Learning Disability and other specialist areas.
• Thirdly CAT is being particularly developed as a consultative tool by Clinical Psychologists mostly in response to complex cases both in relation to community teams and to in-patient teams. This work is likely to develop and have potential more widely for the development of team work, risk management and care planning.
• Fourthly CAT is emerging, in the spirit of its earliest days, as a good common language for developing and reviewing basic skills in relational thinking, therapeutic attitudes and sensitivity to challenging behaviour for all mental health workers. This relational skills approach complements the other two and has potential to develop CAT much more widely to people working in educational as well as welfare and medical settings.

ACAT North will be aiming to keep in mind the wider context to its training and consultative work. The range of developments which are emerging need researching. In addition the gaps in provision need to be noted. For example there has never been a basic pre-professional qualification entry into CAT training and as increasing numbers of Clinical Psychology trainees have elements of CAT training as a routine part of their clinical training there are opportunities to think about how CAT can work as an over arching relational and integrative framework for the kind of versatile range of competencies at the heart of clinical psychology training. The mix of skills training, personal and professional coaching and mini therapy based on CAT on which we report through our work with the Lancaster Clinical Psychology course is a case in point.

In this context we have also been active in widening the range of work with a variety of partnership agreements to develop CAT skills in house or as part of training. These are currently being delivered or in the pipeline with Cheshire and Wirral Learning Disabilities Services, Lincolnshire Adult Psychological Services and Humber Forensic Centre. In addition there continue to be range of team based CAT skills trainings, projects and service developments designed and delivered by the ACAT North team and graduates of the course as part of their employment within statutory organisations (e.g. Lancashire Care NHS Trust; Barnsley Primary Care Trust; Sheffield Health and Social Care Trust).

The emphasis on all these developments is in basic relational skills training through the use of CAT’s dialogic approach to mapping interactive patterns and states of mind. In the past year we have begun gathering this work under a wider umbrella for all our work as a not for profit, social enterprise training, research and consultation organisation called Catalyse. We hope to take further steps to build this organisation in the year ahead and have a one day conference planned for April 23rd with this in mind as advertised on the ACAT website.

Annual recruitment figures for the ACAT North Course over the years
As described above the course continues to recruit strongly with a lot of interest in the new intake with several late applicants for whom there wasn’t a place. We are currently checking our records to review completion rates over the years. We are pleased to say that a number of people who for various reasons didn’t complete the course earlier are now completing. Reasons for withdrawal are mainly to do with health or geographical move.

On an administrative and course leadership front we are delighted to have a new administrator Frances Free in post. This is making a big difference and we have rotated our course leadership roles with Glenys Parry taking over as course director from Steve Potter after three years in the role. Mark Dyer has a key role as our Finance Director. The course team of lead trainers continues to be Dawn Bennett, Debby Pickvance, Mark Evans, Sarah Littlejohn, Lawrence Welch, Glenys Parry and Steve Potter.

CAT is thriving in Scotland through two centres - one in Lothian and one in Lanarkshire so both in the Central Belt. In Lothian we have been given protected time to provide two 3-day Introduction to CAT trainings in the year. From these trainings we get a number of people interested in undertaking supervision for a couple of cases and we have several supervision groups running. In addition there is a five day training being provided through Napier University.

In Lanarkshire the trainings have been based around the 5-day skills training and this is being offered to other areas throughout Scotland. CAT is also developing within Forensic NHS services in Scotland with 5-days skills trainings having been developed and delivered for this context.

It is not always easy to keep the momentum for the CAT Scotland meetings and CPD events, but we are planning for a one day annual meeting, and hope this will enable more people to attend. We will put details on the website when we have a firm date.

At this time we are also coming to the end of our first national Practitioner Training which has gone very well. However, we now have to review our resources and make decisions about when or whether to run another one in the near future.

For more details contact:
Mark.Ramm@nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk – secretary of CAT Scotland or Maggie Gray Maggie.b.Gray@nhslothian.scot.nhs.uk

As you know ACAT has so far had a voluntary CPD policy which has taken a facilitative approach so that members do not have to face yet further requirements to record and submit information. The policy has relied on members keeping a personal record of their CPD and signing to say that they have met the CPD requirements when their membership is renewed each year. This approach has worked for a long time and has been able to continue so long as ACAT was not required to keep track of members’ CPD in any more formal way.

There have been a couple of recent developments that have led to us having to change this policy. The first one, of which you will all probably be aware, is statutory regulation. The HPC requires organisations to have a formal CPD policy where logs are checked and requirements on time and types of CPD activity are made more specific. In order for the registers of organisations such as ACAT to be transferred to the HPC in 2012 they must have a policy in place that meets these requirements. In fact, when you look at what the HPC requires this is not particularly onerous or demanding and the range of acceptable CPD activities in very broad. However, it will feel like a bit of a culture change for us and we have tried to make the new policy as straightforward and simple as possible. The second, related development is that in light of regulation the UKCP has now also changed its requirements of Member Organisations and is similarly requiring us to introduce a more formal policy.

We hope that you will find the new policy straightforward to put into practice. As most of us have a core profession, we will be recording our CPD anyway and it should be fairly simple to keep track of any CAT CPD you are doing at the same time. The policy itself will be circulated separately. However, just to summarise the main components of it, all practising members of ACAT will need to develop an annual CPD plan in collaboration with their clinical supervisor, line manager, tutor, peer supervisor or colleague. The idea is that it is developed out of discussion with a colleague and there is a great deal of flexibility around who this might be. The plan needs to include three or more types of CPD activity over 30 hours, 20 of which should be CAT specific. The policy itself will begin in October 2010 and then in October 2011 there will commence an annual audit of a random sample of 2.5% of practitioners and 2.5% of psychotherapists, who will be asked to fill in and submit a CPD profile. Members will only be audited once they are at least two years’ post practitioner accreditation

We appreciate that this is a change of policy that will have an effect on the records you are required to keep. Our aim has been to structure the policy to make the process as simple as possible and also to be of benefit to you as we approach statutory regulation. The new policy is on the ACAT website and it is important that you familiarise yourself with it. If you are chosen to be audited from 2011 we will send you a CPD profile to fill in and return by a specific date. A member of Council with responsibility for CPD is being appointed to undertake the assessments of chosen profiles and will report to the Exam Board and the member on the outcome. ACAT is also expanding the amount of CPD that is offered to make the requirements as easy to meet as possible.

Mark Westacott

I hope you have enjoyed the first edition of the ACAT e-newsletter. The next edition is planned for July following the meeting of the Training Committee and Exam Board in late June, and the July conference. The last date for receiving contributions is Wednesday 8 July.

I shall be at the conference armed with pencil, paper and camera so please come and say hello, let me know where you work and what you do – but don’t be surprised if I ask you to write a piece for the newsletter or for Reformulation. I’m looking forward to getting to know you all better and to help you know about what is going on in the CAT world.

Maddy Jevon