Enhancing Veteran-Clinical Collaboration in VA Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Recovery Centers

About This Grant

Recovery-oriented care is an imperative for the VA, particularly in mental health programming for Veterans with serious mental illness (SMI). Collaborative decision-making (CDM) is a recovery-oriented approach to treatment decision-making that supports meaningful involvement for patients across all aspects of decision- making, thereby empowering patients and facilitating better decision-making based on patient values, preferences, and cultural context. CDM is associated with several important outcomes including improved personal recovery, treatment engagement, treatment satisfaction, and social functioning. However, current levels of CDM among Veterans with SMI are low. Collaborative Decision Skills Training (CDST) is a promising 10-session group intervention that support Veterans to gain knowledge, skills, comfort, and confidence to collaborate with their clinicians and other members of their treatment teams. CDST has undergone initial testing in a VA Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Recovery Center (PRRC) and demonstrated feasibility for use among Veterans participating in PRRC care. This initial tests demonstrated preliminary evidence that CDST is effective at increasing Veteran-clinician collaboration, personal recovery, empowerment, treatment engagement, and social functioning. Therefore, the proposed study will examine CDST’s effectiveness among 119 Veterans with SMI participating in three PRRCs in the Southwestern United States (San Diego, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque). Veterans will be randomized to either CDST or active control (AC). The primary outcome measure will be functioning within the rehabilitation context, meaning Veteran CDM behavior during usual care VA mental health appointments. Secondary outcomes are treatment attendance, engagement, and satisfaction, along with functioning outside of the rehabilitation context (i.e., rehabilitation goal attainment, sense of personal recovery, empowerment symptom severity, and social functioning). Given that CDM is fundamentally an interaction between Veterans and their clinicians, the team will also assess whether clinician factors (i.e., engagement in CDST training or delivery; therapeutic alliance; work satisfaction; burnout; perceptions of self-efficacy; organizational climate; attitudes about recovery and CDM) moderate Veteran outcomes. Veterans in both groups will attend 10 hour- long group sessions held over 10 weeks. All Veterans will complete an assessment battery at baseline, post-intervention, at three-month post- intervention follow-up, and at six-month follow-up. This will allow the team to assess durability of CDST’s hypothesized benefits. Veterans who leave PRRC care and then return while the study is still active will complete one final assessment to further assess whether benefits are durable to re-entry to care. Additionally, the team will assess equity of benefits by assessing subgroup differences in benefits by race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. A team of Veterans and clinicians will be recruited to co-create consensus equity guidelines to support effective and equitable delivery of CDST in PRRCs. The results of the proposed study will confirm CDST’s benefits for Veterans in PRRC care and inform the utility of providing CDST broadly to Veterans with SMI. The results of this study will expand current understanding of CDM among Veterans with SMI by providing a large, diverse sample to 1) assess CDST’s overall benefits; 2) durability and equity of those potential benefits; 3) whether and how clinician factors impact those potential benefits; and 4) identify how to deliver CDST and related interventions effectively and equitably.