Introduction

Many of the young people AMBIT is designed for have high levels of Complexity and Comorbidities. It can be difficult to decide which intervention to use, when, and the AMBIT AIM assessment can help you in this task by analysing your results and generating suggested interventions in the form of ranked lists, which provide direct Links to the manualized interventions.

How does it work?

At the end of the AIM Form you will see a final page titled AIM Results. At the bottom of that page you will see the Suggested Interventions section.

The AIM questionnaire collects the severity scores you have entered across the 40 items in the questionnaire for your client, and then uses quite simple algorithms to rank potentially useful (evidence-based) interventions for the problems you have identified with your client. These algorithms are explained below.

The fact that different lists of suggested interventions are generated is in itself designed to communicate to the KeyWorker that, because the lives and difficulties of young people we work with a generally marked by COMPLEXITY, there is NOT a simple mechanical relationship between "problem a" and "intervention x"

Thus the KeyWorker is encouraged to use these lists as an additional layer of 'mentalized' oversight on a case; one that offers a more or less objective perspective on the options open to him or her, or to discuss them in supervision The lists should be used to monitor whether or not what is being delivered is broadly in line with other thinking, and to stimulate questions if there is wide variance between what is suggested and what is actually being offered:

"Am I offering my 'favourite' interventions, rather than the ones most suited to the needs of this person at this time and place?"

See also WhichInterventionWhen for other advice on how to sequence what to do, or I'm stuck: what next? if you are at a more general impasse.

How does it rank interventions?

In order to make it quite clear that this is not a "check-box" exercise, and that there must be flexibility for the worker in deciding what to do, there are different ways to sort these suggestions, depending on whether you want to look at addressing the whole spread of a young person's difficulties (GLOBAL ranking), or to focus on the most severe ones first (FOCAL ranking), and whether you want to limit your attention just to the KeyProblems.

• GLOBAL RANKING - each suggested intervention is ranked according to how many different problems (that is, AIM items scoring greater than 2) the young person has which that particular intervention has evidence for being effective in treating. This is good for selecting interventions that will COVER THE WIDER SET OF PROBLEMS AND THEIR CAUSES, in particular for finding approaches that might address some of the Comorbidities that frequently act as maintaining factors for the young person's difficulties.

• FOCAL RANKING - each suggested intervention is ranked in order of how SEVERE the set of problems it has evidence for being effective in treating are (their averaged AIM scores). This is good for FOCUSING THE MOST EFFECTIVE INTERVENTIONS ON HELPING WITH THE MOST SEVERE PROBLEMS.

• LIMIT, as the title suggests, this limits the suggested interventions that are ranked in both of the above sorting algorithms only to those relevant for items identified as KEY PROBLEMS.