(PS12-A21) Utility of the Clinician/patient Global Impressions Scales in the Context of Measurement Based Care

The Clinician Global Impressions Scale (CGI) and Patient Global Impressions Scale (PGI) are commonly used brief assessment tools in mental and behavioral health settings to measure overall symptom severity and improvement throughout treatment. This 1-item scale provides a rating of a client's symptoms and overall functioning severity, as assessed by both the clinician (CGI) and the client (PGI), with 1 being the least severe and 7 being the most severe. Measurement-based care (MBC) is a transdiagnostic and transtheoretical practice involving the systematic ongoing collaborative evaluation of client functioning data, such as symptom severity and psychological adjustment, to inform clinical decision-making and behavioral health treatment. The utilization of MBC is recognized as an Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) that has been shown to improve quality of care and the effectiveness of psychotherapy overall. For MBC to be successfully implemented, the utilization of well-validated and reliable measures is required to evaluate client status and enhance therapy outcomes. Although CGI/PGI has been used in a variety of healthcare settings, there is a distinct lack of literature investigating the utility of these measures in psychotherapy, particularly in the context of MBC. Moreover, MBC practices tend to focus solely on patient-reported measures, whereas CGI ratings would provide a clinician-reported measure. This study intends to investigate the utility of CGI/PGI in the context of measurement-based care, where these measures were regularly completed pre- and post-treatment to rate the severity of each status of each client and evaluate the improvement at the end of the therapy. Three CGI and PGI scores each were collected for the purpose of this study. CGI and PGI severity scores at intake (CGI-S-I/PGI-S-I) and discharge (CGI-S-D/PGI-S-D) and CGI and PGI improvement scores at discharge (CGI-I/PGI-I). Participants (n = 100) had CGI-S-I scores ranging from 2-7, CGI-S-D scores ranging from 1-6, CGI-I scores ranging from 1-4, PGI-S-I scores ranging from 1-7, PGI-S-D score ranging from 1-5, and PGI-I scores ranging from 1-5. The majority of the participants identified as female (51.5%), white (72%) and their mean age was 19.65 years (SD = 10.854, range =5-54). Data aggregation is ongoing and nearly complete. The researchers will perform Pearson Correlations for all six CGI/PGI categories as well as patient reported outcome measures including the Brief Adjustment Scale-6 (BASE-6), Personal Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), and General Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), in order to determine linear relationships between gold standard symptom specific measures and the CGI/PGI. We expect that the CGI and PGI will be positively linearly correlated with each other and that each will be positively linearly correlated with gold standard symptom specific measures. By taking a step in the direction of determining the utility of CGI and PGI in psychotherapy within the context of MBC, researchers and clinicians will be able to better serve the growing need for mental health services in communities at large.