How Patients Guide Therapy: A Pilot Study on the Development and Reliability of the Patient Coaching Rating System

What is it about?

Patients play an active role in shaping their therapy by communicating their needs, goals, and challenges to their therapists. This study introduces the Patient Coaching Rating System (PCRS), a tool designed to measure this process in psychotherapy. Raters used the PCRS to assess patient coaching in therapy sessions and found it to be highly reliable in identifying when patients provide key details about their experiences, challenges, and therapy goals, and moderately reliable in identifying when patients signal how they want therapy to proceed, such as by giving feedback on what works for them. These findings support the PCRS as a promising method for studying how patients guide their own therapy.

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