What Is Treatment Fidelity?

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole coming in from the NYU Motor Speech Lab. We're back from Seattle, and in case you missed our talk on treatment fidelity, I plan on doing a couple of videos to go over what it is and how you can use the tools we've been using in our research in your own practice with your motor speech kiddos.

Today I want to talk quickly about what treatment fidelity is. In a nutshell, in the context of treatment research (in our case, CAS treatment research looking at DTTC), it's making sure the treating clinician is following the treatment protocol as it's intended.

Of course, the treating clinician, a.k.a. me, could always say, "Yes, I'm doing it right. I feel like I'm doing it right." But how do we know I'm doing it right and following the protocol? We came up with a fidelity checklist. In our Instagram posts, I shared the research article that recently came out with Dr. Grigos and Dr. Case, where we share what we're actually using, and I'll talk a little more about that.

But basically, we have raters who view randomized therapy sessions. All of my treatment is recorded, and they make sure I'm sticking to the protocol.