People living with brain conditions benefit from taking part in group therapy sessions focused on psychological flexibility and acceptance, a new service evaluation has found.
The project involved patients who completed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) sessions at Salford Royal Hospital, part of Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust.
Overall, participants developed stronger emotional connectedness and better knowledge of their difficulties through sharing their experiences, more effective psychological skills, and different mindsets regarding their condition following the sessions.
The research team from the Clinical Neuropsychology Department will now use the results of their evaluation to help refine the way they support future groups and improve patient care.
Mindfulness
Consultant Clinical Neuropsychologist Dr Katherine McIvor and Senior Assistant Psychologists Hannah Dempsey and Eliza Nash led the sessions with 13 patients who had conditions including brain tumours, epilepsy, stroke, and chronic hydrocephalus.
The patients attended eight two-hour sessions covering topics such as mindfulness, acceptance of difficult thoughts and feelings, and learning how to unhook from unworkable thoughts. They were given booklets of all the session content and set ‘homework’ tasks to help them reflect and put what they’d learnt into practice.
Later, the patients took part in qualitative interviews with Clinical Psychologist and Honorary Clinical Lecturer Dr Nicolò Zarotti to explore their experiences. Senior Assistant Psychologist Alice Storey then performed a thematic analysis on these, from which three key themes emerged: the initial barriers the participants found in taking part; building an environment of acceptance where sharing experiences brought a sense of normalcy, alleviating feelings of isolation and embarrassment; and developing an ACT toolkit where the participants continued to use and develop the coping skills and approaches they’d learnt.
Insight
Senior author Dr Zarotti said the team had already responded to the barriers to participation that the patients highlighted by developing additional paper and digital resources to give prospective attendees a better insight into the structure and content of the therapy.
He added: “We found ACT group interventions are acceptable and feasible with people with different neurological conditions, so we don’t need to set up disease-specific groups. This may help to reduce waiting times for appointments and make providing this service more consistent for our patients.”
The paper “It’s knowing that there are other people and they’ve accepted it”: Patients’ experiences of an acceptance and commitment therapy group intervention for people with neurological conditions has been published in the journal Neuropsychological Rehabilitation and can be accessed for free here. The authors are Alice Storey, Eliza Nash, Hannah Dempsey, Dr Katherine McIvor, and Dr Nicolò Zarotti.