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The Balancing Act of Clinician, Educator, and Researcher

By
Melissa Milanak, PhD
Published
Updated
training graduate students

Assessments are used in many ways by mental health professionals. Whether you identify as a researcher, an educator, or a clinician, many individuals find themselves serving in multiple roles where the only thing consistent about the typical day is that it will be inconsistent!

PAR is excited to provide resources, discounts, and support that can save you time and money so you can do what you enjoy most—conduct cutting-edge, impactful research; teach and supervise future mental health experts; or provide your patients and clients with high-caliber care.

Learn more about the resources we offer for clinicians, educators and learners, and researchers.

Resources for clinicians

Simplify assessment selection and battery creation. Don’t have the time to review hundreds of assessments to find the right one or to set up a battery that allows you to get the most information in an efficient way? The PAR Healthcare website (parinc.com/healthcare) now offers construct handouts outlining the most used assessment tools for the most commonly assessed areas. Plus, consider reaching out to your assessment advisor, who will spend the time creating a comprehensive list for you to review and potentially choose from so you can allocate your time elsewhere.

Resources for non-English speaking individuals. Unsure if you should assess in English or Spanish? Consider downloading the Language Acculturation Meter (LAM) for FREE to determine the best course of action quickly and accurately.

Many PAR products are available in Spanish. The search feature on the PAR website can filter by foreign language availability. If you need additional language translations, reach out to your assessment advisor, as many of our assessments are available in multiple languages.

Increase your access to assessments. Through our data sharing program, you can partner with PAR’s research and development team to help collect important data on our assessments while receiving discounts and/or free use of products. All data sharing is deidentified and confidential to protect participants.

Free continuing education credit. Sign up for our PARtalks on-demand webinars, where you can earn continuing education credit for specified webinars from the American Psychological Association, the National Association for School Psychologists, the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Psychology, the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners, or the National Career Development Association. We are constantly adding new sessions, so check back frequently!

Expand your assessment knowledge. Considering adding a new assessment to your practice? We understand the concerns surrounding learning something new and having access to resources to assist you in accurately administering and interpreting the results.

PAR Training is a complimentary resource to our customers and provides online, on-demand trainings and recorded webinars you can access from anywhere—day or night—to accommodate your ever-changing schedule. Because you can set your own learning pace, you can review all of the information quickly if you have a clinical case happening soon, or you can space out your learning at a cadence that works best for you.

Resources for educators and learners

Contribute to your curriculum. Instead of spending hours creating PowerPoints and didactics from scratch, you can access interactive courses and trainings on many of PAR’s assessments through PAR Training. This resource provides you with information about the assessment, navigating the manual, test structure, item and score interpretation, and even case examples that you can use with your trainees. As you are preparing your lectures and selecting the assessments to cover in your courses, you can choose to share the courses digitally and work through them live in class, assign them to your trainees outside of instruction sessions, or even integrate materials directly into lectures and sessions.

Reduce instruction costs. It is important to PAR that our customers have access to the assessments they need. We recognize that budgets are shrinking and becoming more restricted as other costs increase. PAR provides a number of discounts to ensure students and trainees have access to high-caliber, gold-standard assessments. Please contact your clinical assessment advisor to learn more and get approved for these education/ training discounts:

  • Educational Training Discount/University Partnership Program (UPP): This program offers a 40% discount for training in college/university courses using PAR products. These courses should be for graduate students learning to use our published products (this can also apply to undergraduate students). The professor teaching the course must apply for the discount each year. UPP members are eligible for additional benefits, such as up to three free kits for newly adopted PAR products in training courses, as well as free uses on PARiConnect for students. To express your interest in joining UPP, email upp@parinc.com.
  • Clinical Training Discount: This program provides a 20% discount for internships, clinical practicum, and post-doc programs. It is used for training off-site or outside of the university setting. The trainer must submit a form or formal letter on letterhead providing information about their program and the number of students enrolled yearly.

Resources for researchers

 In addition to being your trusted source for assessments for all your clinical needs, PAR is excited to partner with you in many practical ways as you conduct research, whether it involves a large federally funded grant, a manuscript you are preparing to submit, or a course project with your students and trainees running on a zero budget.

Save time. The submission deadline is approaching, and it is time to write the methods section. Instead of spending hours poring through assessment manuals and reading journal article after journal article to extract psychometric data for one paragraph, consider reaching out to PAR directly. Our psychologists and researchers have already prepared and formatted the assessment information into paragraphs that you can insert into your manuscripts and grant applications.

Save money. PAR has two discount programs to support seasoned researchers as well as graduate students:

  • Graduate Student Research Discount: This 40% discount is designed for graduate students using PAR products in their master’s thesis or dissertation research. Students must apply themselves and need a supervisor’s signature. The student or the university can pay for the materials, but the form must accompany the order.
  • Research Support Discount: This is available to professors and researchers who use PAR products in their research studies. The 40% discount can be applied to digital products and print products published by PAR. An application is necessary for approval.

Expand your subject population and data collection reach. Through our digital assessment platform, PARiConnect, you can email HIPAA-compliant links directly to research participants to complete all your research assessments online, expanding your geographical reach. You can also access observer and collateral research data without requiring additional individuals to come into your data collection site. Plus, if you send out an assessment link and a participant decides not to participate, you can revoke the link and reuse the assessment without having to pay extra, saving you money typically lost on unused assessments.

Improve data integrity. When you use PARiConnect, either through the HIPAA-compliant email link or via in-person digital entry, participants enter their own data, removing a layer of data-entry error (and the need to invest in time for research assistants to enter and check data). Plus, with settings to prevent skipping questions, you can reduce the risk of missing data.

Reduce data-processing time. In less than a minute, you can download item-level assessment data to a CSV Excel spreadsheet formatted to integrate with statistics software such as SPSS for all of your participants to increase the ease of data processing and analyzation.

Training for your research team. Through our complimentary PAR Training site, PAR provides on-demand training for you and your research teams to learn about assessments, from their underlying constructs to administration, scoring, and interpretation.

Research support. As you are designing your research, clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists, and psychometrists who have a history of successfully securing federally funded grants and publishing in high-impact-factor journals are available to consult with you to build effective, efficient research assessment batteries.

Writing support. PAR recognizes the amount of time and effort that it takes to identify psychometric and descriptive information and write up product description blurbs for manuscripts, grants, Institutional Review Board (IRB) proposals, and client reports. You can now access and copy these write-ups and add them directly into your work. If there is an assessment that you do not see on the list, please contact your assessment advisor so we can get you the information you need!

 

These are just some of the ways PAR can partner with you, no matter what setting you practice in. Whether you are looking to design, conduct, and publish research, provide thorough and active learning for your students and trainees, or provide clinical care that aligns with best practices, PAR offers a variety of ways to save you time and money. Reach out to our team today to learn more!

 


 

training discounts healthcare health care training
Clinical Assessment Advisor, Melissa Milanak

Meet the Author

Melissa Milanak, PhD