Criteria for Evidence-based Practices

1. The practice is well defined with principles operationally defined.
2. The practice has been studied in a number of research studies.
3. The practice has been replicated by different groups in different settings.
   

Transcript

The goal of this lecture is to provide a rationale for the use of a monitoring tool called the Supported Employment Fidelity Scale and to explain how this tool can be used by practitioners to implement supported employment. One word about terminology at the outset. The Supported Employment Fidelity Scale was originally called the Individual Placement and Support or IPS Fidelity Scale. IPS is a model of supported employment developed by Deborah Becker and Robert Drake, as described in a practitioner’s manual, “A Working Life,” published in 1993. The bulk of the rigorous research on supported employment for people with severe mental illness has been conducted with this model, and in fact the IPS model embodies a set of principles that are widely used by virtually all effective supported employment programs for people with severe mental illness. Consequently, the term IPS has been replaced by supported employment in our more recent work with the Fidelity Scale.

The first step in the lecture is to explain the larger context for use of the Supported Employment Fidelity Scale. Supported employment is one of 6 “evidence-based practices” that were identified by a national panel of experts convened in 1998 to evaluate services for people with severe mental illness. An evidence-based practice must meet several criteria. First, the practice is well defined with explicit program principles that have been operationally defined. Second, the practice has been studied in a number of rigorous research studies, including randomized controlled trials, and the findings consistently show that the practice is effective in achieving valued consumer outcomes. Third, the practice has been replicated by different groups in different settings with similar results. The national panel concluded that supported employment currently is the only evidence-based practice in the area of vocational rehabilitation.