Podcast episode 9: Measurement with Casey Meinster

Psychotherapy Notes podcastCasey Meinster is the Director of Evidence Based Practices at Hathaway-Sycamores Child and Family Services, a major mental health services provider in Los Angeles. In that role, she wrangles a lot of information. But one piece of information I learned from her changed how I think about the importance of measurement in psychotherapy.

Hathway-Sycamores serves thousands of clients a year through more than a dozen programs. They fund those programs through a variety of sources, including government contracts, grants, and other sources. And it is now the case that every single program they run now has to produce outcome data on its clients. Their payors demand it.

In this final episode of our first season, Casey and I discuss just what it means to be a Director of Evidence Based Practices, how she manages all that data, and why measurement is good for all mental health professionals, regardless of where you work. (If you’re interested in some specific measures, we also have this blog post about low- and no-cost outcome measurement tools we like.)


Some specific measures Casey noted:
Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS)
Outcome Questionnaire (OQ) series
Restrictiveness of Living Environment Scale (ROLES)

You can download our entire first season now on iTunes and Stitcher, and read about (and listen to) previous episodes here:

Episode 1: How licensing exams are like the TSA
Episode 2: Licensing exams with Kim Madsen, California BBS
Episode 3: Student debt
Episode 4: Student debt: Two stories
Episode 5: Public Service Loan Forgiveness: Not dead yet
Episode 6: Psychotherapy’s gender gap
Episode 7: Men in therapy, with Angela Caldwell, LMFT
Episode 8: Measurement

This puts a wrap on our first season of the podcast. We hope you’ve enjoyed it! We’ll be back in late 2018 with our second season, which will focus on the difficult moral choices therapists must make every day. More on that to come. In the meantime, stay tuned to the blog here and to our Facebook page for more great information on the world of psychotherapy practice.