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Contents
Purpose of, and background of, CORE and CST
The CORE system came from events described in History about “core measures” and evolved over the last nearly 30 years with many inputs, see Acknowledgements.
CORE System Trust (CST) is an informal association which holds the copyright of the CORE instruments but seeks to promote their use without payment of reproduction fees (see Copyright and Licensing for details). CST currently consists of three people all of whom have been involved in the development of the CORE instruments and CORE system from the offset and bring three different and complementary sets of experience and perspectives. We aim to protect the copyright and to encourage and support use of the instruments within the spirit we had from the start. The focus is on the instruments and your use of them but we include a bit of biographical information below.
This wordle of words in titles of papers linked with the instruments as of late 2014, gives a rather nice sense of how extensively the instruments have had impacts.
Protecting the copyright
CST holds the copyright on the CORE instruments and protects that. This is not to make money but:
(a) to ensure that everyone can be sure they are using the same instruments where that’s appropriate so that findings are comparable across all work with the instruments and
(b) to maintain a high standard for approved translations.
The instruments are copyright to us (where things are slightly more complicated, with inclusion of copyright material from others, donated to the instrument, this will be very clearly stated). From the launch in 1998 they were “copyleft” for reproduction on paper, i.e. free to reproduce without changes, without payment of any fees. Since the 2015 they have been copyleft for any reproduction under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence, see Copyright and Licensing . This means that we make no charge for reproduction, not only on paper as had always been the case, but also in software, still provided they are not changed in any way, including translation without explicit permission.
The spirit of CORE
There were many aspects to the “spirit of CORE” but primary among them were a “bottom up” principle: that decisions about usage should be made by practitioners deciding what was appropriate to their work; and a principle collaboration between practitioners, researcher/practitioners and researchers to explore and develop the most useful ways to use the tools. We were always particularly keen that they should be used in PRNs, Practitioner Research Networks; and in the philosophy of PBE, Practice Based Evidence as much as in that of EBP, Evidence Based Practice. We continue to publish, almost entirely in collaboration with users of the instruments, to promote such work (including work in this spirit that may not use CORE instruments, we never saw them as the only viable tools) and we hope to use this web site to promote such work too.
The trustees
Michael Barkham
I am a clinical psychologist by training and have spent over 30 years engaged in psychotherapy research, holding professorial posts at the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield. As part of the research carried out within the Sheffield Psychotherapy Projects in the 1980s, I developed an interest in measure development and the use of outcome measures in routine practice.
Together with Chris and Frank, I was part of the team that developed the CORE-OM and associated derivatives. The application of CORE measures in routine practice helped to underpin the development of practice-based evidence within the psychological therapies.
I have been fortunate to work on a range of quality outputs that have utilised the CORE datasets and helped to provide a complementary evidence-base for the psychological therapies to that yielded by randomised controlled trials alone.
I am currently Director of the Centre for Psychological Services Research at the University of Sheffield and my current interests lie in combining the strengths of practice-based evidence and trials methodology.
I am currently Director of the Centre for Psychological Services Research at the University of Sheffield and my current interests lie in combining the strengths of practice-based evidence and trials methodology.
Chris Evans
Like Michael and Frank, I have been involved with the CORE system from the very first MHF meeting in 1994. By background I am a “Medical Psychotherapist”, i.e. a psychiatrist who has specialised in psychotherapy. I started in psychiatry in 1984 and was immediately clear I wanted to pursue a career in psychotherapy as both a practitioner and researcher. As well as the Royal College training, specialising in analytic psychotherapy, I have also trained in Group Analysis and Family/Systemic Therapy.
I worked clinically in settings from high secure hospitals to community based NHS and charity psychotherapy services and have a particuar interest in personality and “personality disorder”. I stopped working clinically in 2016. I have taken a school fascination with maths into my research and been particularly interested in the mathematics and statistics of how we attempt to measure subjective experiences. That interest, with a passion for open standards, copyleft distribution and, later, open source software, led me to the CORE project.
In CST I have lead responsibility for translations and psychometric and statistical questions and issues and maintain the web site and handle enquiries.
Frank Margison
I am a psychiatrist working in general psychiatry and psychotherapy. I was involved in setting up Society for Psychotherapy Research UK from its inception in the early 1980’s, and was UK vice-President for three years. I have worked on several research strands – including psychiatric problems in parents, and developing and teaching the psychodynamic-interpersonal model of psychotherapy [PIT] as well as being a clinician in Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust at Gaskell Psychotherapy Centre and for the last five years working as visiting psychiatrist in student counselling at University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University.
Since being one of the grant holders of the MHF grant that developed CORE-A I have been actively involved in establishing CORE within clinical governance- in the NHS and the university counselling sectors. It is imortant to have routine measures that are easy to administer. Building these measures into a system that can support practice has been something I have been committed to for many years and one of my troles as a Trustee for CORE has been to build up experience of clinical governance of using routine measures.
Since being one of the grant holders of the MHF grant that developed CORE-A I have been actively involved in establishing CORE within clinical governance- in the NHS and the university counselling sectors. It is imortant to have routine measures that are easy to administer. Building these measures into a system that can support practice has been something I have been committed to for many years and one of my troles as a Trustee for CORE has been to build up experience of clinical governance of using routine measures.
CORE Information Management Systems (CIMS)
People sometimes here when what they want is the company CORE Information Management Systems (CIMS), and vice versa. CIMS produced the CORE-PC and now the comprehensive CORE-Net software system that originally provided only the CORE instruments but now provides many other instruments as well (and the vital support for users of their systems). Until 2015 CST only granted a licence to CIMS to put the CORE instruments into software so that CIMS could recoup the considerable set up costs involved in creating such systems and supporting them. Since 2015 they have continued to include CORE instruments but are completely independent of CST and vice versa.
Next perhaps: the history; acknowledgements.
Page created 1/1/2015, last updated 5/3/21; author CE/CST; header image Aime la Plagne, France, CE; licence of text and image: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) .
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