An investigation of self-assessment bias in mental health providers.

Previous research has consistently found self-assessment bias (an overly positive assessment of personal performance) to be present in a wide variety of work situations. The present investigation extended this area of research with a multi-disciplinary sample of mental health professionals. Respondents were asked to: (a) compare their own overall clinical skills and performance to others in their profession, and (b) indicate the percentage of their clients who improved, remained the same, or deteriorated as a result of treatment with them. Results indicated that 25% of mental health professionals viewed their skill to be at the 90th percentile when compared to their peers, and none viewed themselves as below average. Further, when compared to the published literature, clinicians tended to overestimate their rates of client improvement and underestimate their rates of client deterioration. The implications of this self-assessment bias for improvement of psychotherapy outcomes are discussed.

Readability level of health insurance portability and accountability act notices of privacy practices utilized by academic medical centers.

Recently enacted Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act legislation requires health care professionals to provide patients with a "Notice of Privacy Practices" (NPP) document as part of their informed consent process to participate in assessment and treatment. We were interested in the readability of these forms. We attempted to find a NPP from an academic medical center in each state plus the District of Columbia where documents were placed on the institution's Web site. Documents were obtained from 40 jurisdictions and were then analyzed utilizing two measures of readability. The majority (65%) of these documents were written beyond the 12th grade reading level, and almost the entire sample (90%) fell in the difficult range of reading ease. Academic medical centers have an ethical obligation to improve the readability of these documents and should do so to improve clinical practice and reduce liability.

Survival strategies in community mental health: a study of management consensus.

Human service agency and program managers were surveyed on survival strategies in the face of shrinking government funding. The two groups ranked strategies in order of importance and researchers compared results. There was strong general agreement between the two groups, suggesting that top and middle management are working ideologically and practically along the same lines.