Models of Consultation & Collaboration
1. Mental health consultation
- Focuses on the implications of human service professionals’ mental-health related programs on the client system and organizations.
- Aims at both “helping consultees help their clients and helping consultees become more effective professionals”.
- Aims at enhancing psychological well being of those involved.
1. Client-Centered Case:
- The consultee presents a case in which a client has mental health problems that are causing the consultee some difficulty.
2. Consultee-Centered Case:
- The primary objective is improvement of the consultee’s ability to work effectively with a particular case as well as with similar cases in the future.
3. Program-Centered Administrative:
- The consultant assesses and defines the problem and proposes a series of recommendations to the program/programs.
4. Consultee-Centered Administrative:
- The consultant helps in solving problems in personnel management or the implementation of organizational policy.
Behavioral Consultation
- A problem-solving process that has its foundation in behavioral theory.
Common Steps:
- Describing and identifying the problem by using behavioral terminology..
- Examining what happened before and after the problem.
- Choosing a target behavior and defining behavioral objectives in terms of desired changes.
- Designing a behavior change program to achieve all the objectives.
- Implementing and actively evaluate the program.
Methods:
- Reinforcement (Positive/Negative)
- Punishment
- Extinction
- Ignoring
- Shaping
- Differential reinforcement
- Environmental Cues
- Inadvertent Reinforcement
- Contigency Contracting
- Behavioral Rehearsal
Types:
1. Behavioral case consultation:
- The consultant provides direct, behavior-based service to a consultee to manage the client/or group of clients.
- Consists of four stages: Identifying the problem (data, especially environmental data are collected), analyzing the problem, implementing a treatment, and evaluating the treatment.
2. Behavioral technology training:
- When consultees seek to increase general usage of behavioral technology principles when working with clients.
- A form of consultee-centered consultation with an emphasis on providing training for consultees in consultation-related matters.
3. Behavioral system consultation:
- Consultants use behavior technology principles to analyze and change interactions among the various subsystems of a larger social system.
4. Conjoint Behavioral Consultation:
- it uses parents and teachers as conjoint consultees.
- Designed to bridge gap between school and home and maximize spread of effects from one setting to another.
Organizational Consultation:
- Process in which a professional, functioning, either internally or externally to an organization, provides assistance of a technical diagnostic nature to an individual or group from that organization, or to the entire organization itself.
- Main aim is to improve the organization’s ability to engage in productive change and enhances its effectiveness.
1. Purchase of Expertise Model:
- The consultee knows what the problem is, what needs to be done to solve it, and who can be of help (the problem has been identified by the consultee).
- The consultant provides combination of information, methods, tools and support to consultees to solve the problem (content-oriented).
E.g: Education-Training Consultation/Program Consultation
2. The Doctor/patient Model:
- The consultant’s help is sought because the organization knows “something is not right” and does not know what that “something is”.
- Consultant is asked to make the “diagnosis” and “prescribe a solution”.
3. The Process Model:
- The main point is that process consultant assists the organization in defining and solving its own problems.
- Supplement the consultee’s problem solving skills.
- The consultant’s expertise includes skills to involve the consultee in defining the problem, to form a team with the consultee, and to ensure that the consultation process focuses on the consultee’s needs.