Practice-research integration in the residential treatment of patients with severe eating and comorbid disorders.

Abstract

Residential treatment involves a number of treatment components and modalities, and treatment staff come from diverse training backgrounds. These complexities present unique challenges for the implementation of standardized programming, training, and routine assessment to support practice and research aims. Implementation science highlights the critical role of clinician attitudes in successful adoption and sustainability. This article describes an ongoing real-world quality improvement effort to implement transdiagnostic evidence-based interventions for primary eating disorders, as well as routine data collection, in a residential eating disorder treatment center. We specifically focus on clinicians' subjective experience of, and attitudes toward, the implementation of new treatment strategies and data collection. Participating clinicians completed a semistructured interview based on constructs from the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research, an organizing framework for implementation practice and research. Interviews were analyzed using consensual qualitative research. Results indicate that clinicians had positive overall implementation experiences, with available resources, leadership engagement, patient needs, relative advantage, and self-efficacy emerging as constructs that had the greatest impact on implementation. Clinicians also offered specific critiques and suggestions about the intervention and the implementation process. These results can inform internal sustainability efforts and can be integrated into future evidence-based intervention implementation and data collection efforts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).