Topic: clinician skills

Effective working groups can continue their traditions through surprising changes in location, membership, etc.

Addiction programs, conversely, targeted elimination or at least substantial reduction in substance use– a narrower goal that permitted greater focus in treatment.

The best way we’ve found to teach clarity in documentation (and that’s really the goal) is to use real-life examples and ask the group for feedback on the quality of each student’s progress note.

You’re probably not thinking about the stuff you wrote about today’s middling-good group session as something that could be important when an insurance company reviews the case.

We’re often in the position of spending more time documenting what we do than in actually doing it.

When a group has been mired in the hostile or helpless mode, and breaks through into work, you’ll see an almost tangible change in tone.

We’ve never seen a group that works, right from its inception. Progress toward work usually involves struggle through one or more of these modes.

When a group adopts one of these operating modes permanently, as a primary form of interaction, they end up actively resisting any responsibility for achieving individual and group goals.

Patients are often afraid to ask, but when they do, they seem to want the truth.

Busy professionals, though, may rely on “taking notes,” and doing the more formal documentation “later, when there’s time.”