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Using CAT in Team Consultancy

CAT has a well-established approach to team-based training which is used throughout the UK. This can be particularly helpful for clients with complex presentations who may struggle to form collaborative treatment relationships and whose interpersonal difficulties may play out in the team or systems around them. 

How can CAT help?

Clarifies the team task

• Formulation and care/treatment planning
• ‘With’ not ‘about’ the patient/service user

Offers a shared language for formulation

• Acceptable to wide range of backgrounds
• Reduces inter-disciplinary tension

Non-collusion with problem patterns

• Non-blaming, supportive, containing framework for everyone – including the client
• How not to get caught up in automatically responding to the patient’s difficult behaviour and emotional reactions.

How not to get caught up in automatically responding to the patient’s difficult behaviour and emotional reactions.

Contextual reformulation is an approach which has evolved out of attempts to address more complex processes involved in the perpetuation and exacerbation of an individual’s psychopathology.

In contrast to a CAT personal reformulation:

• It takes account of (reformulates) the wider system within which the user and worker are embedded
• It draws on concepts from systemic therapy and organisational theory
• It is a service response to making sense of and formulating complex cases

“Contextual reformulation integrates an understanding of the patient’s difficulties with problematic professional responses, reframing what it means to hold an adaptive professional position when trying to help such patients”. (Ian Kerr). 

Glenys Parry

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