Many agencies go through periods of staff turnover, transfers across work units, or new hiring which result in some staff being further ahead in the Supervisor's EBP BriefCASE series than their new colleagues. Ideally, all staff would start at module 1 and end at the same time on module 18.
We receive two common responses from others in your situation: agencies either provide individual makeup sessions for the newly placed staff to catch them up to their work unit peers (conducted by either the supervisor or a lead staff member) or the staff simply join their peers at whatever BriefCASE session the rest of the unit is working on.
While the BriefCASE modules are sequenced purposefully starting with professional alliance because this skill is foundational to engaging the person toward change and then proceeding to case planning, skill practice, and rewards/responses to noncompliance, we recognize that office environments are dynamic and staff moving in and out of work units should be anticipated. We think that the response by other BriefCASE users is sound advice (to do individual tutorials or have them simply join their staff unit sessions), especially since the modules are booster sessions and should be reinforcing material staff have already been exposed to.
If you choose to have new or transferred staff join their peers at whatever BriefCASE session they are on, you may consider repeating the BriefCASE sessions after 18 months, in which case staff will likely get exposed to the material they missed earlier.
As for keeping track of which staff attended which BriefCASE session, we are aware of some agencies that ask supervisors to keep attendance. Staff who miss a class then need to either join up with another work unit that is conducting that BriefCASE module or arrange for the supervisor/lead staff for an individual makeup session.
One agency has offered the following further advice:
- All divisions have created either a master schedule or an online calendar which shows when they are offering each session.
- If staff miss a session with their unit, their supervisor will either teach it to them individually or will refer them to the specific session that another unit within their division is offering.
- All supervisors keep attendance for each session and send the information to the EBP Program Manager who tracks the attendance for the department and determines if each division is meeting departmentwide performance measures related to attendance and other BriefCASE goals.
- Once we complete all the modules, we confirm if the department has met its performance measures and determine our next steps to address makeup sessions and future cohorts for the BriefCASE.