A Brief Online Implicit Bias Intervention for School Mental Health Clinicians

Freda F. Liu, Jessica Coifman, Erin McRee, Jeff Stone, Amy Law, Larissa Gaias, Rosemary Reyes, Calvin K. Lai, Irene V. Blair, Chia-li Yu, Heather Cook and Aaron R. Lyon
Additional contact information
Freda F. Liu: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine, 6200 NE 74th Street, Suite 100, Seattle, WA 98115, USA
Jessica Coifman: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine, 6200 NE 74th Street, Suite 100, Seattle, WA 98115, USA
Erin McRee: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine, 6200 NE 74th Street, Suite 100, Seattle, WA 98115, USA
Jeff Stone: Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, 1503 E University Blvd. Building 68, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
Amy Law: Learning Gateway, University of Washington School of Medicine, 850 Republican St., Bldg. C-4, Seattle, WA 98109, USA
Larissa Gaias: Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, 850 Broadway Street, Lowell, MA 01854, USA
Rosemary Reyes: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine, 6200 NE 74th Street, Suite 100, Seattle, WA 98115, USA
Calvin K. Lai: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, CB 1125, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA
Irene V. Blair: Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Muenzinger D244, 345 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309, USA
Chia-li Yu: Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, 140 Moore Building, University Park, State College, PA 16802, USA
Heather Cook: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine, 6200 NE 74th Street, Suite 100, Seattle, WA 98115, USA
Aaron R. Lyon: Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine, 6200 NE 74th Street, Suite 100, Seattle, WA 98115, USA

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 2, 1-19

Abstract: Clinician bias has been identified as a potential contributor to persistent healthcare disparities across many medical specialties and service settings. Few studies have examined strategies to reduce clinician bias, especially in mental healthcare, despite decades of research evidencing service and outcome disparities in adult and pediatric populations. This manuscript describes an intervention development study and a pilot feasibility trial of the Virtual Implicit Bias Reduction and Neutralization Training (VIBRANT) for mental health clinicians in schools—where most youth in the U.S. access mental healthcare. Clinicians ( N = 12) in the feasibility study—a non-randomized open trial—rated VIBRANT as highly usable, appropriate, acceptable, and feasible for their school-based practice. Preliminarily, clinicians appeared to demonstrate improvements in implicit bias knowledge, use of bias-management strategies, and implicit biases (as measured by the Implicit Association Test [IAT]) post-training. Moreover, putative mediators (e.g., clinicians’ VIBRANT strategies use, IAT D scores) and outcome variables (e.g., clinician-rated quality of rapport) generally demonstrated correlations in the expected directions. These pilot results suggest that brief and highly scalable online interventions such as VIBRANT are feasible and promising for addressing implicit bias among healthcare providers (e.g., mental health clinicians) and can have potential downstream impacts on minoritized youth’s care experience.

Keywords: human-centered design; Implicit Association Test (IAT); implicit bias; mental healthcare professionals; online training; school mental health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/2/679/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/19/2/679/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:19:y:2022:i:2:p:679-:d:720092

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().