(PS10-80) Clinical Decision Making Among Youth: What’s Knowledge Got to Do with It?

Clinicians who work with youth make numerous important clinical decisions as part of their professional practice. This includes decisions on assessment practices, diagnosis/educational classification, consultation, and clinical intervention. Practitioners need to access and process a considerable amount of knowledge from years of training to ensure the proper diagnosis and care for patients (Hunink et al., 2014). As an example, Gerardi (2018) reported that it is vital that mental health practitioners are adequately knowledgeable about suicide prevention and postvention to competently implement risk assessment procedures for students and manage suicidal behavior to properly assess and intervene. Interestingly, she also found a considerable knowledge-practice gap and the fact that clinicians may not be as knowledgeable as they perceive themselves to be (Gerardi, 2018). Knowledge about psychological disorders among youth has regularly been studied with varying measures of knowledge across different disorders such as ADHD (Sciutto et al., 2016), Autism (Harrison et al., 2013), selective mutism (White at al., 2022), social anxiety (Hebert et al., 2013), suicidality (Gerardi, 2018), and Tourettes (Katz, 2018; Masopust, 2013) among others. While it is important to understand the current knowledge level of professionals regarding these disorders, a more important consideration is whether this knowledge impacts clinical practice and decision-making. If a clinician is objectively knowledgeable in a clinical area but has never implemented these practices in vivo, will they have the confidence necessary to make effective clinical decisions? Across various fields, there has been a gap between what someone in the field learns and their incorporation of that knowledge into practice, called the knowledge-action gap (Khan et al., 2013; MacDonald & Frank, 2016; Wilkins et al., 2013). As new research continues to emerge, there is a lack of application of these findings in clinical decision-making (Wilkins et al., 2013). This is why it is also important during training to obtain what is referred to as actionable knowledge or knowledge that can be readily incorporated into clinical decision-making (Wilkins et al., 2013). In psychotherapy, mental health professionals are trained to administer evidence-based psychotherapies (EBP). The current study aims to reduce the knowledge-practice gap. The researchers have reviewed and coded varied measures of knowledge of childhood disorders and examined the psychometric properties of these measures. Preliminary results reflect that the majority of measures are true/false or objective in nature and do not have any skills or practice-based components in them. Further, performance on these measures is quite poor and may be reflective of insufficient knowledge. Where measures did have application components to their research, they often involved case vignettes where participants were asked to consider specific aspects of clinical decision-making. They were then evaluated on their knowledge of what was an evidence-based decision. The results of the proposed study have the potential to significantly expand the current research on knowledge of psychological disorders among school-age children.