APT was founded in 1981 by William Davies and Derek Perkins, two clinical psychologists based in Birmingham, England. It is now a limited company, registered in London, with its head office in Leicester. Its express purpose on foundation and to this day was and is to provide the best training possible to ‘the helping professions’: psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health nurses, social workers, occupational therapists, etc.
Over 85,000 professionals have attended APT training, mainly from the UK National Health and Social Services, although with a significant number from independent health providers. ‘APT Canada’ is a franchise run by clinical psychologists Tania Safnuk and Todd Kettner, based in Regina, Saskatchewan, and offering APT courses throughout Canada.
APT employs over 100 highly experienced clinical and educational psychologists on a consultancy basis, with about a third being regularly employed. All these tutors are senior clinicians (mostly consultant psychologists) mostly employed in the UK, Ireland, or Canada. Their area of expertise is in mental health and related fields.
We pride ourselves on providing the most interesting, and relevant training, on courses ranging from 1 to 33 days. Our specialist areas are:
- Adult Mental Health
- Children and Adolescents
- Older Adults
- Learning Disability
- Brain Injury
- Forensic
- Substance Misuse
The training is provided predominantly 'OnSite', meaning ‘at the premises of the sponsor’. The sponsor provides the teaching room, participants and any refreshments, we provide everything else. That way a 'critical mass' of staff receives training in a given subject so they can support each other subsequently.
A development since 2007 has been the provision of many of the live courses ‘online’. Because many of our live courses use video footage, this element transfers to online training very easily and enables students to watch demonstration videos until they feel confident of being able to replicate what they see.
We have a number of ‘noted’ courses, especially:
- The RAID® Course: a relentlessly positive approach to working with challenging behaviour.
- The DICES® System, for risk assessment and management.
- The ABC Course®: Aggressive-Behaviour Control.
- The Be-BEST System for the reliable delivery of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
The way we maintain quality is by spending a lot of time developing and maintaining the course content, and then recruiting talented professionals to deliver it. In turn they feed in to the development process which results in continuously maintained quality. We check this by obtaining feedback on the two key scales of relevance and presentation-quality from every course delegate. The information so obtained is shared with the course sponsor. Moreover we write to attenders four months after the training to check on its usefulness.
In summary, our concern is to make training just as relevant and interesting as we can, with the aim of benefitting both those who attend the training and also the end user, the patient. A recent development since 2008 has been to introduce MoodMaster, a sister company whose focus is to provide prepared programmes for professionals to deliver relevant material direct to patients who require it.
APT (The Association for Psychological Therapies)
The Dower House
Thurnby
Leicestershire, LE7 9PH
UK
Tel: 0116 241 8331
Email: office@apt.ac
Website: www.apt.ac