Transferring psychotherapy clients: State of the art.

Transferring psychotherapy clients from one therapist to another is a common event that may pose clinical and administrative problems. Clinicians and therapists in training transfer clients when their professional role or activities change or when they leave their clinical settings. We review the literature on transferring psychotherapy clients and report on aspects of the transfer process and procedures used by a national sample of psychology training clinics. We also report and discuss the results of an exploratory analysis training clinic records in which we investigated the relation between transfer outcome (successful vs. unsuccessful) and a set of treatment and demographic factors. Last, we suggest several ways of handling difficulties that arise as a result of clinical and administrative reassignment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)