The Processes of EBP

EBP Demands an Individualized Collaborative Process

Now that you have mastered your understanding of the full breadth of the principles of EBP, you are ready to move on to the processes of implementation. Besides standardizing a risk assessment and motivational interviewing training to your staff, what other key processes are you engaging in for the betterment of your organization?

Are you focusing on ways your management team can work together in a logical and practical way to implement an integrated set of EBP processes? Are you creating new habits with staff?

Based on our work with Time to Change Community Corrections, we’ve organized the 12 EBP (the eight original principles identified in Bogue, et. al and four that we believe needed to be explicitly articulated and separate from the original eight) principles into six major collaborative process areas with Measurement and Feedback as universals across all processes.

As shown in the graphic below, we have outlined these EBP processes from beginning to end of the client relationship life cycle. These processes ultimately prioritize the work that goes into each area and with their corresponding EBP principles.

1. Create Knowledge – The E in EBP is about Evidence. Unless you determine what, you’d like to learn and measure on the front end of your program plan and intervention, you will never have meaningful data to inform future plans.
   • Identify Measurement Points and Processes
   • Gather, Interpret and Use Feedback

2. Create Trust – This is an essential component to creating an environment for behavior change. Skip this step at your own peril…
   • Build the Therapeutic Relationship

3. Create Structure – Many clients cannot create adequate structure on their own. That is part of why they need you. The structure you introduce to your clients is an essential tool for them to take with them when they discharge from your program as it communicates what is and what is not appropriate behavior in our society.
   • Establish Behavioral Accountability and Structure
   • Reinforce Positive Behavior

4. Create Focus – Define your client’s top need or two, connect them to your client’s values, help identify individual intrinsic motivations that help your client succeed, and use interventions for only those needs you have targeted. Focusing your and their attention is the foundation of an individualized plan.
   • Assess Risk, Need and Responsivity
   • Enhance Intrinsic Motivation
   • Target Interventions

5. Create Change – Far more than a prescriptive list of don’ts, creating change is probably the most challenging and rewarding part of being a community corrections professional. Creating change in a client’s behavior certainly requires a partnership with the client. Have an unwilling client? Check back to Step 2 on creating trust. Assuming you have progressed to this step with a client, it is part science, part creativity, and always involves good listening and engagement skills by all parties involved.
   • Collaborate on a Case Plan
   • Engage the Community
   • Train Behavioral Skills 

6. Create Independence – A client will struggle when completely on their own again. They will need structures, tools and community relationships in place to help them when they start to fall back into old habits, poor relationships and other risky behaviors. If you helped create the change, you are probably best suited to help define a solid transition plan with your client. Don’t assume someone else will magically figure out everything you learned about your client.
   • Transition Plan

Each of the six major processes builds on each other and incorporates measurement and feedback to assure repeatability, continuous improvement and fidelity to the programming standards you have set for your organization.