The human givens approach to psychotherapy is rapidly growing in popularity because it proves, in practice, to be both fast and reliable.

However, despite the evident efficacy of the approach — which practitioners and their clients experience time and again — the importance of formal research into the human givens (HG) approach is well recognised by the HGI and its members.

All human givens therapists are encouraged by the HGI to work in an outcome informed way, and the results contributed by HG therapists to date are very promising.

Ongoing monitoring by the HGI Practice Research Network of these results indicates that our clients need to stay in therapy with HG therapists for an average of only 3.6 sessions (with the most common number of sessions being 2) and that 90% of our clients see their HG therapist for 6 visits or fewer.

Huge potential savings

As well as being highly beneficial for our clients, this obviously means that the HG approach has the potential to save huge amounts of money for resource-starved organisations. Formal research will help the HG aproach to become even more widely known and available to the people that need it.

With this in mind, one of the main objectives of the registered charity, the Human Givens Foundation (HGF), is to promote research into the human givens approach, as well as raise the funds to carry that research out. As a result of the charity's hard work there are now numerous significant research projects underway.

They include:

NHS Practice Research Project

A partially HGF-funded study of HG efficacy within an NHS practice in Luton is being carried out by Dr Gina Johnson, with the help of three HG therapists. The two year research project is expected to shed light on efficacy, cost savings and the value of integrating HG into primary care. CORENET and ORS/SRS will be used as the research tools. It is hoped that this study will become part of:

Multi-site HGI PRN study

In this study 30 HG therapists working in a wide variety of settings up and down the country (in either private practice or publicly funded practice) will monitor outcomes over a six month period using CORENET and ORS/SRS as the research tools. This exciting, carefully monitored study will be the largest evaluation of the HG approach to date.

If you have completed the HG Diploma and are interested in participating in this study please contact Bill Andrews through the HGI PRN website at www.hgiprn.org

University Research Project

Staffordshire University is currently researching the human givens programme which is being introduced across Sandwell PCT’s mental health services throughout 2007. More will follow on this project in due course.

The HGI Research Practice Network

The HGI Research Practice Network was set up in association with the HGF by Bill Andrews to both raise awareness of the need for formal research and develop the use of progress and outcome measures in practice. The CORE system of measurement has been adopted as the research tool of choice as CORE is already well established within the NHS and is acceptable to the Department of Health as a validated reliable system.

An exciting new development is the soon-to-be-released CORENET system that allows therapists to process and share data across the internet. Using a measurement tool recognised by the NHS and other organisations will mean that human givens psychotherapy will, for the first time, be able to be benchmarked and evaluated against national averages in terms of effectiveness of outcome.

The HGI Practice Research Network (HGI PRN) also encourages HG practitioners to use ultra-brief ORS/SRS outcome measures with every client at every session because extensive research supports the clinical value of formally monitoring the therapeutic alliance and tracking progress in therapy.

One of the great advantages of ORS/SRS is brevity. These measures enjoy wide acceptance and use in the USA, Canada and Scandanavia. However, because they are less well established in the UK, the HGI PRN hopes to do a correlation study of ORS with CORE, enabling us to present HG research data gathered using ORS/SRS as an equivalent CORE result. Again this will be much more meaningful to NHS managers and funders generally.

Many HG therapists have already signed up and are participating in measurement of outcomes. The more therapists who become involved the more robust our data becomes and so we actively encourage all HG therapists to become interested in outcome measurement.

To find out more, please visit: www.hgiprn.org

Further information:

The recently published book, An Idea in Practice: Using the human givens approach, contains a wealth of examples how the human givens approach has benefitted a wide variety of fields, from primary care to education, and even diplomacy.

In addition, lots of case histories and examples of the human givens approach in practice are included in the wide variety of articles in our archive.

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