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:

  1. Describing and identifying the problem by using behavioral terminology..
  1. Examining what happened before and after the problem.
  1. Choosing a target behavior and defining behavioral objectives in terms of desired changes.
  1. Designing a behavior change program to achieve all the objectives.
  1. Implementing and actively evaluate the program.

Methods:

  1. Reinforcement (Positive/Negative)
  2. Punishment
  3. Extinction
  4. Ignoring
  5. Shaping
  6. Differential reinforcement
  7. Environmental Cues
  8. Inadvertent Reinforcement
  9. Contigency Contracting
  10. 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.