Introduction to core competencies for BESTCO certified\nsextherapists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since 2000 or so, the core competencies movement in psychotherapy has led to the identification of requirements for therapy and therapists across theoretical orientations and clinical domains. One conspicuous omission has been core competencies for the practice of sex therapy. The Board of Examiners in Sex Therapy and Counselling of Ontario (BESTCO), a training and certifying body first established in 1975, struck a committee in 2015 to deal with this gap. In this article, we review the history and mission of BESTCO, including the requirement of prior competence in relationship therapy; the background that led to the expansion of the organization; and the needs of supervisors for a document that would guide us and our growing cadre of apprentices/trainees in professional development. The growth in need for clinical services and changes in the regulation of psychotherapy in the province of Ontario, Canada in recent years converged. The expansion of the field without the underlying infrastructure to assist us in supervision created the need for greater clarity and delineation as to what exactly constitute the core competencies in sex therapy. The committee endeavored to create a cross-theoretical tool for assessment and clinical practice with implications for training, supervision and certification. We hope it will advance the field.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.013 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".