A Web-Based Therapist Training Tutorial on Prolonged Grief Disorder Therapy: Pre-Post Assessment Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Prolonged grief disorder (PGD) is a newly recognized mental disorder characterized by pervasive intense grief that persists longer than cultural or social expectations and interferes with functioning. The COVID-19 epidemic has resulted in increased rates of PGD, and few clinicians feel confident in treating this condition. PGD therapy (PGDT) is a simple, short-term, and evidence-based treatment developed in tandem with the validation of the PGD diagnosis. To facilitate the dissemination of PGDT training, we developed a web-based therapist tutorial that includes didactic training on PGDT concepts and principles as well as web-based multimedia patient scenarios and examples of clinical implementation of PGDT. Objective We aimed to evaluate user satisfaction with the tutorial and whether the tutorial increased trainees’ knowledge of PGDT principles and procedures. Moreover, we included a small number of pilot questions to evaluate the PGDT-related clinical skills. Methods This study evaluated tutorial learning using a pre- and poststudy design. Participants were recruited from professional organization mailing lists, announcements to graduates of the Columbia School of Social Work, and through word of mouth. After signing consent, participants completed a brief demographic survey, a 55-item multiple-choice prestudy test on the concepts and principles of PGD and PGDT covered in the tutorial, and a 4-item pilot web-based prestudy test to gauge PGD clinical implementation skills. The link to the course content was then activated, and participants were given 8 weeks to complete the 11-module tutorial containing information, web-based exercises, simulated patient and video examples, and self-tests. Results Overall, 406 clinicians signed consent, and 236 (58.1%) started the tutorial. Of these, 83.1% (196/236) completed all 11 modules. Trainee scores on our PDGT assessment improved substantially from pretraining to the postmodule assessment, with the total number of correct answers increasing from a mean of 29 (SD 5.5; 52.7% correct) to 36.7 (SD 5.2; 66.7% correct; t195=18.93; P<.001). In addition, the trainee’s implementation scores on 4 clinical vignettes increased from 2.6 (SD 0.7) correct out of 4 to 3.1 (SD 0.4) out of 4 (t188=7.02; P<.001). Effect sizes (Cohen d) were 1.44 (95% CI 1.23-1.65) for PDGT assessment and 1.06 (95% CI 0.84-1.29) for implementation. Trainees found the tutorial interesting, enjoyable, clearly presented, and useful for professional development. They endorsed a mean score of 3.7 (SD 0.47) on a 1 to 4 scale of agreement with recommending the course to others and feeling satisfied with the tutorial, and a mean of 3.3 (SD 0.57) with feeling able to apply the skills with clients. Conclusions This pilot study provides support for the usefulness of this web-based training for teaching clinicians how to administer PGDT. The addition of patient scenarios for clinical implementation strategies holds promise for increasing the effectiveness of PGDT training and other evidence-based treatments. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05121792; https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05121792
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".