Quality Assurance In Psychotherapy: Meeting The Challenge
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Quality in the healthcare system calls for safe, adequate and focused patient care. The care must be provided by a licensed professional and enhance the patient’s quality of life in a cost-efficient manner. Overall, the goal of the intervention is to bring forth patient and population-specific improvements at a greater rate than in the absence of treatment. Quality in psychotherapy refers both to the psychotherapeutic service as well as to an organization’s internal processes. Ultimately, it is a proxy for the degree to which treatment corresponds to specific expectations.

These expectations must be explicitly stated. An example includes the ethical guidelines governing psychotherapy. As a quality assurance tool, these general guidelines describe the values and expectations in the context of ethical treatment practices attempting to discern positive from negative actions. On the contrary, the therapist’s role as an aide in the individual patient’s healing process requires chiefly a subjective set of values. However, quality assurance of universally valid treatment practices must always adhere to objective-phenomenological ethical guidelines.

Quality Assurance in Switzerland – A Status Report

As evidenced in recent years, quality assurance has come to play an increasingly important role in psychotherapy. Yet, the general population and professionals alike are hesitant to renounce their image of a presumably flawless therapist. The widely held belief that due to their academic training therapists are “better” people that deserve unconditional trust is worrisome. But the psychotherapeutic community is resisting: Many German and Swiss therapists fear the denunciation of their profession.

Fear in this regard however is counterproductive. The arising controversy in fact strengthens the profession through its assessment of therapeutic services and subsequent transparence of the therapeutic process. It subjects traditional psychotherapy to qualitative evaluations, at long last lifting the curtain on what much too often takes place behind closed doors within the protected space of therapeutic encounters. The publication of successful case documentations in literature is not apt to assure the effectiveness of psychotherapy.