Using the AIM assessment in the AMBIT manual

The AIM assessment is an adaptation of the validated HCAM (Hampstead Child Adaptation Measure) and is itself due to get validation following its use as one of the measures in the large multi-centre IMPACT study of adolescent depression. The AIM was adapted in order that it could be integrated within the AMBIT manual; there, through simple algorithms, it can generate ranked lists of links to manualized material that offer evidence-based responses to the variety of problems that young people present with, and results can be exported direct to an Excel or SPSS database. Here is a short video about its use:

The Community of Practice

I haven't been writing much here recently, as increasingly the AMBIT TiddlyManual IS the blog (see http://ambit.tiddlyspace.com). We have been working hard to increase the "surface area" of the community of teams who are using this material (there are nearly 60 versions of the AMBIT manual - accessible from http://www.tiddlymanuals.com) and here is a video about part of this work:

An AMBIT Conference - May 10th

Moving on - training across a city

The pace of trainings in AMBIT is quickening, and we are glad that we have five fantastic Associate trainers now, who will be running trainings increasingly independently soon. Most recently, we have trained an in-patient unit and an Intensive Support outreach team in Cambridgeshire, and we are in the middle of training 160 (yes, 160!) workers from across the whole of Belfast - psychologists, family therapists, psychiatrists, social workers, youth offending officers, nurses, OT's, etc, all drawn from multiple teams in a citywide network of CAMHS and aligned provision. This strikes us as extremely exciting, and not a little scary, but the opening day seemed to receive a warm welcome and to offer a reasonably good fit with perceived training needs. It does seem that the web-based manual that presents (increasingly clearly I think) "what you are getting into" has played a part in helping to support this major dissemination. This exciting Belfast project is encouraging us to address very seriously the whole notion of an evaluation framework for assessing the impact of such a training exercise, and of course some of this will involve examining what is working and what is not in respect of the web-based wiki manuals. One of the key points about a TiddlyManual wiki approach to 'treatment manual' is that it is fantastically flexible - and we (Dohhh, only recently!) have realised that there is masses of stuff that we can put up there to support trainings - like video of the key chunks of didactic material so that a less confident public speaker can watch pre-prepared video and then run exercises that we know have proven helpful in previous trainings. Equally, we are putting up a lot of training exercises for local teams to run "internally" to support and embed implementation of new methods of working. See the training materials in the AMBIT manual here