Objective
This thesis aimed to measure and explore knowledge, attitudes, confidence, and treatment practices among clinicians working in children and young people’s mental health services (CAMHS) when delivering psychologically informed interventions to gender diverse youth. It sought to investigate whether a model of clinical self-efficacy, knowledge, attitudes, and demographic factors predict clinician confidence delivering psychologically informed interventions to this population.
Design
A cross-sectional mixed methods online survey design was utilised to collect information on treatment practices and to examine the hypothesised relationships.
Method
A sample of 79 CAMHS clinicians completed measures of treatment approaches and adaptations, demographic factors, clinical self-efficacy, knowledge, attitudes, and confidence delivering psychologically informed interventions to gender diverse youth. The attitudes measure had a substantial amount of missing data, which led to just 53 complete cases when including this measure. Two linear regression models were conducted. Model one included the attitudes measure, and model two extracted this measure.
Results
Participants endorsed evidence-based interventions and utilised a variety of cultural adaptations. In model one, knowledge significantly predicted clinical confidence. In model two, knowledge and attitudes significantly predicted clinical confidence.
Conclusions
These findings suggest that knowledge predicted clinician confidence delivering psychologically informed interventions to this population. Moreover, affirming attitudes predicted confidence, suggesting that clinicians who hold more affirming attitudes may find delivering psychologically informed interventions to gender diverse youth easier than those who hold less affirming attitudes. However, these relationships were observed cross-sectionally, therefore, the direction of these relationships is unclear. Both models lacked enough statistical power to meaningfully measure the observed relationships, particularly model one. Therefore, results should be interpreted in the context of the study limitations. Future studies may wish to replicate the existing study prospectively, with a larger sample size, to examine the relationships over time and to compare with the present study’s findings.
