ABSTRACT
In recent years governments have focused on clinical practice being evidence based and increasingly mental health workers are being encouraged to examine their clinical practice with a more critical eye. Many have welcomed this evidence-based approach as a means to improving the standard of healthcare accessed by patients (Chambless and Ollendick, 2001). Indeed, Salkovskis (2002) observes of the movement toward evidence-based practice that: ‘It is encouraging that those who worked solely on the basis of clinical judgment and personal prejudices are now being encouraged to take a more systematic approach, and to base the choice of treatment on what is defined as “gold standard” outcome evidence.’ However, Salkovskis also strikes a note of caution advising that relying solely on the outcome results of randomized controlled trials is too narrow a base on which to found practice. Rather he advocates the notion of ‘empirically grounded clinical interventions’ based on the scientist-practitioner model (Barlow et al., 1984; Salkovskis, 2002).
