5 - (IOP 1) Applying Behavior Change Techniques in Community-informed Interventions: The Gender-affirming Psychotherapy Training for Mental Healthcare Providers

Background: Cultural competency training in healthcare aims to promote provider adoption of practices that reduce health disparities. Despite the importance of these trainings for reducing health inequities, few if any, systematically incorporate evidence-based behavior change techniques (BCTs). We developed a BCT-driven training to promote the adoption of best practices for mental health providers treating transgender youth called the Gender-Affirming Psychotherapy Training. It was developed with the transgender community, the providers who serve them, and it is online and self-paced.

Purpose: This paper describes the BCTs and associated mechanisms in the training, categorized by training tool (e.g. stories, practice) to provide a template for training developers and health equity researchers.

Methods: Training content was comprehensively coded using the 93-item Behavior Change Technique Taxonomy. Descriptive statistics were calculated.

Results: 38 unique BCTs and 22 linked mechanisms were included in the training. The three most common BCTs were: Information about emotional consequences, Information about social and environmental consequences, and Demonstration of behavior. The three most frequently targeted mechanisms were Beliefs about consequences, Attitude towards the behavior, and Subjective norms. Among training tools, stories utilized the most unique BCTs (mean = 6.7) and targeted the most unique mechanisms (mean = 8.2) per instance.

Conclusions: Results suggest that stories may be a potent and scalable training tool; they concurrently leverage several BCTs and target multiple mechanisms. Future research should separately evaluate training tools, their proximal effects on target mechanisms, and their more distal effects on provider adoption of culturally competent practices.