On the Road to Collaborative Treatment Planning

Although consumers have made significant gains in having their voices heard in several areas within mental health, they have made less progress in being able to collaborate with their own treaters in setting treatment goals. Based on several years of ground-work by staff at the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC), the Patient Care Committee conducted a needs assessment of providers and consumers to assess both groups' current involvement, interest in, and attitudes toward collaborative treatment planning. The results indicate that providers tend to place much of the responsibility for the difficulties in implementing collaborative treatment planning on consumers. Also, providers tend to underestimate consumers' interest in participating in this process. Implications of these findings for the development of an agency-wide training to enhance the collaborative nature of treatment planning are discussed.