2024 Jenike Young Investigator Award

Co-delivered exposure with response prevention in Outback Australia: A novel training model to increase access to evidence-based care for OCD in rural settings

Katelyn Dyason, PhD

University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia)

Award Amount: $47,856.40

Exposure and response prevention (ERP) is highly effective for treating children and adolescents with OCD, with up to 70% improving from treatment. Unfortunately, there is a well-documented lack of clinicians who provide high-quality ERP, leading to a treatment gap that is particularly felt in rural and remote areas. In Australia, there are no identified OCD specialists more than 100 kilometers from a metropolitan area. Training and supporting more clinicians to address this access barrier is complex and challenging, and we do not know how much more is required to make this training effective. This study will develop and test a new method to train rural clinicians in ERP, where they observe an expert clinician from a metropolitan-based OCD speciality hub deliver ERP and then slowly transition to delivering this treatment themselves with supervision from the expert clinician. In this way, the expert clinician and rural clinician will “co-deliver” ERP to rural clients. The expert clinician will join the session via telehealth, and the rural clinician will be face-to-face with their rural client to assist with ERP tasks. Six rural clinicians will be trained and twelve rural young people with OCD will receive this co-delivered telehealth ERP. The goal of this co-delivery mode is to significantly improve clinicians’ knowledge about ERP, competency and confidence delivering it, increase intentions to implement ERP with future clients, and significantly decrease negative attitudes relating to ERP. Additionally, it is hoped that the co-delivered telehealth ERP will significantly reduce clients’ symptoms, functional impact, and family accommodation of OCD. The study will allow rural young people with OCD to receive specialist ERP treatment that would otherwise be inaccessible to them, and will hopefully result in rural clinicians who are trained and competent to continue delivering ERP, benefitting many future children and adolescents in their care. It will also improve our knowledge about effective ways to train clinicians to competency and increase access to evidence-based OCD treatment in routine clinical practice.