Routine measurement and feedback can be used to improve outcomes for youths who receive typical home-based services in the community.

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Despite the dearth of consistent evidence for conventional feedback mechanisms in clinical practice, the primary methods of feedback for clinicians remain supervision and clinical experience. A new research approach, known as patient-focused research, provides clinicians with direct feedback regarding a client's health status and relative progress in therapy. This article briefly reviews the relation of different types of feedback (i.e., supervision, clinical experience, feedback on client health status) to clinical outcome. In contrast to the mixed results for clinical experience and supervision, providing client health status feedback to clinicians significantly improves outcome, especially for clients who are not doing well in therapy. We conclude with a description of a model that provides insight into ways that feedback interventions can work best for professionals. Characteristics of the clinician, the feedback format, and the dissonance between feedback and clinician goals all relate to the ways that feedback is interpreted and utilized.

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There is increased need for comprehensive, flexible, and evidence-based approaches to measuring the process and outcomes of youth mental health treatment. This paper introduces a special issue dedicated to the Peabody Treatment Progress Battery (PTPB), a battery of measures created to meet this need. The PTPB is an integrated set of brief, reliable, and valid instruments that can be administered efficiently at low cost and can provide systematic feedback for use in treatment planning. It includes eleven measures completed by youth, caregivers, and/or clinicians that assess clinically-relevant constructs such as symptom severity, therapeutic alliance, life satisfaction, motivation for treatment, hope, treatment expectations, caregivers strain, and service satisfaction. This introductory article describes the rationale for the PTPB, its’ development and evaluation, detailing the specific analytic approaches utilized by the different papers in the special issue and a description of the study and sample from which the participants were taken.