The Ultimate Guide to Reducing Client Dropout: Advanced Strategies to Keep Clients Engaged

CPD

Handouts

Speaker

Bernard Schwartz, PhD Related seminars and products

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Dr. Bernard Schwartz is a licensed clinical psychologist and co-author of How to Fail as a Therapist: 50 + Ways to Lose or Damage Your Patients, which focuses on the factors leading to therapeutic success or failure and has been adopted by dozens of university training programs throughout the country, as well as Thoughts for Therapists: Reflections on the Art of Healing. He has published numerous journal articles on the subject of enhancing therapeutic outcomes through the use of rapid assessment instruments. He is founder and past director of student psychological services at Santiago Canyon College in Orange, California, where he taught for two decades. Dr. Schwartz has taught at the preschool, elementary, undergraduate, and graduate levels and has developed a number of specialties including sports psychology and parent-child relations. He has supervised dozens of therapist interns at multiple agencies with a focus on trauma, post-divorce adjustment, and developmental issues.

 

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Dr. Bernard Schwartz maintains a private practice. He has employment relationships with Outreach Concern, FACES of Orange County, Paladin Eastside, and Chapman University College. Bernard Schwartz receives royalties as a published author. He receives a speaking honorarium from Psychotherapy Networker and PESI, Inc. He has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Dr. Bernard Schwartz has no relevant non-financial relationships.

Objectives

1. Employ three strategies for determining client expectations from therapy and communicating therapist expectations for clients.
2. Demonstrate two strategies for discussing and implementing termination procedures.
3. Analyze components of the working alliance as related to clinical treatment outcomes.
4. Assess clients’ stage of change and psychological reactance to inform clinical treatment interventions.
5. Respond therapeutically to ruptures in the alliance to improve client engagement.
6. Determine four consequences of therapist burnout on clients.

Outline

• What we can learn from therapists who have low dropout rates
• The role of therapist humility.. and denial
• How to embrace mistakes and repair ruptures

• Understand and make use of the power of the working alliance
• Rapport-building actions you can take right away
• Enhance empathy with challenging clients using compassion and future focus
• Consequences of therapist burnout on clients – how to assess and respond to burnout

• How to assess clients’ strengths and happiness, not just their symptoms
• The unexpected benefits of assessment, including enhanced view of the therapist
• Obtain narrative understanding of the client’s world
• Utilize motivational enhancement to harness the power of stage of change
• Understand and work with the phenomenon of psychological reactance

• Address the end at the beginning: Gain client collaboration with therapeutic goals and maintain solution focus
• Choose interventions that make sense and are consistent with the client’s preferences
• Develop effective “out of session” activities
• Increase client confidence in therapist expertise and therapy success
• Special considerations for specific populations (e.g., male clients; clients with significant comorbid medical conditions; child clients)

Target Audience

• Counselors
• Social Workers
• Psychologists
• Psychiatrists
• Marriage & Family Therapists
• Addiction Counselors
• Other mental health professionals