Treatment Planning 101

By G. Scott Graham

Treatment Planning 101 will give counselors and coaches a foundation in how to develop goals and action plans for any client. Counselors, including social workers, mental health workers, substance abuse providers and psychotherapists will learn new ways to help a client navigate into the unknown.

Scott Graham, an experienced clinical supervisor who also holds a degree in business, shows how clinicians and coaches can effectively apply tools traditionally used by business consultants to help clients strategically think about their life situation. The text also includes a link to a video where the author demonstrates one of the tools, Forcefield Analysis, using an unrehearsed, unscripted role play.

Graham provides an overview of the four directions treatment plans can take clients then outlines a revised framework for SMART, the criteria often applied in treatment plan development and often applied when assessing the efficacy of treatment plans.

In Treatment Planning 101 you won't find a long list of potential treatment plans to cut and paste to your heart's content. What you will find are is an in-depth look at proper treatment plan mechanics.

This text includes a link to a free companion workbook to help the reader explore the concepts outlined in this text to his or her own life situation.

This text can be used in conjunction with training or as a stand-alone process to make sure that everyone in an organization is speaking the same language and approaching treatment planning from a similar perspective

• Language: English
• Publisher: G. Scott Graham
• Release date: Jun 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005313883

G. Scott Graham

Scott Graham is a career coach and business coach in Boston, Massachusetts. Scott is driven to help clients follow their "true azimuth," which is different from "true north." It means coaching clients to identify the true focus of their life -- something that speaks individually to them. It means recognizing the forces that push our lives off course and adjusting to them so you get where you want to go. It means that when you are 90 years old and you look back on your life you have a sense of pride, accomplishment, and meaning -- with no regrets.

Book preview

T R E AT M E N T

P L A N N I N G 1 0 1

G. Scott Graham

True Azimuth Coaching

Copyright © 2021 G. Scott Graham Al rights reserved

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Fill-in-the-Blanks

A Shift

Fast-Forward to 2020

Good Treatment Planning

Case Examples

The Sixth Person: You

Part One

Overview

SWOT

Case Applications

Discussion

Forcefield Analysis

Part Two

Overview

Deep Dive: Information

Case Applications

Discussion

Deep Dive: Insight

Case Applications

Discussion

Deep Dive: Awareness

Case Applications

Discussion

Deep Dive: Action

Case Applications

Discussion

Part Three

Overview

Deep Dive: Simple

Case Applications

Discussion

Deep Dive: Measurable

Action + Awareness =

Bonus Trick: Rate and Bait

Case Applications

Discussion

Deep Dive: Accountable

Accountability: The How

Accountability: The Who

Case Applications

Discussion

Deep Dive: Realistic

Case Applications

Discussion

Deep Dive: Timely

Case Applications

Discussion

Wrapping It All Together

Do You Feed Clients Fish?

Teach Clients How to Fish

Case Application: You!

Appendix

MAI

Case Applications

Discussion

About The Author

Other Books by Scott Graham

Contact Scott Graham

I N T R O D U C T I O N

There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.

HOWARD THURMAN

FILL-IN-THE-BLANKS

Iremember my first job working as an inpatient counselor in 1988: a time before computers, cell phones, and tablets; a time of copy machines and metal filing cabinets holding paper clinical charts.

As I was new, I was given an orientation to treatment planning at the facility. I was taken to this storage cabinet in a shared office overflowing with treatment plans—at least 50 of them—each addressing a separate issue from boredom to anger to relapse prevention to trauma to lack of a support group. And each of these plans had at least 50 or so copies piled on top of each other, neatly organized in this huge cabinet.

Each plan was ready to go. Each plan was written in the best clinical language. The result of many quality assurance review processes, each plan was finely tuned to meet all the requisite criteria to get insurance payment, state funding, and third-party accreditation. Each plan was perfect. The counselor had to simply fill in the blanks with the client’s name and date.

Each plan took an issue, then identified activities, lectures, and other components of the treatment program that every client was already doing—or would soon be doing as part of the program—and put them in a nicely wrapped treatment plan format. It was easy. You simply looked up an issue (they were filed alphabetically by topic / issue, or you could refer to a master list), pulled out that plan, filled in the client’s name, added a date, reviewed the plan with the client, and then both of you signed it. Done. Quick. Easy.

And totally bullshit.

Of course, I didn’t realize how bogus, disconnected, and disingenuous that process was. I guess no one did. It seemed that is how everyone did treatment plans at that time.

Everyone did the same 28-day program and participated in the exact same schedule of activities, and did the exact same written assignments. And these treatment plans took those program activities and assignments and rationalized an application to every issue possible that someone could have coming into a treatment center. Each day, everyone in the entire program would have time to exercise (I think they called it Get Fit), and these treatment plans rationalized that scheduled activity as a solution to everything from anger to depression to isolation to active addiction (because of course when you are actively using any substance, taking care of your body is not a priority, right?).

It was a shoe-horn approach to treatment: everybody did the same thing, yet it was all somehow magically individualized and solved each person’s specific problem.

A SHIFT

At some point—I am not sure when—the landscape changed around treatment planning. And it was a change for the better. I was working in a none-month, intensive outpatient treatment program offered through the Vermont Department of Corrections called ISAP, and the only thing everyone participated in was groups.

Each person truly had an individual treatment plan to focus on and report on at each group meeting. Eventually, those of us who facilitated the ISAP Program taught the clients treatment planning.

The groups evolved not only to provide support and accountability for treatment-plan implementation but became a forum for the development of treatment plans where the clients themselves worked together to create some of the most clinically sound and efficacious plans I have ever seen.

As my role expanded to Clinical Supervisor and eventually to Program Director, I had the opportunity to conduct training sessions throughout the state of Vermont. One of those training sessions was

—you guessed it—treatment planning. And we were replicating what we were doing in the ISAP program in other programs in the state.

Along the way, I had the privilege to provide clinical supervision to Serenity House, an inpatient treatment center in Wallingford, Vermont. Unlike my initial experience with inpatient treatment, individualized treatment planning was cemented as a core competency for staff, and although they had access to a new service offering a computerized databank of generic treatment plans to use,

Reviews for Treatment Planning 101

[michelle potter · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The author’s disdain of using insight as one of the tools toward self actualization overshadows any valuable information he is trying to deliver. There are much better books than this on the subject.