Development of a training programme in individual case formulation skills and a scale for assessing its effectiveness.

Background: Little is known about the skills involved in clinical formulation. The individual case formulation (ICF) approach, based on functional analysis, employs clinical descriptions that are theory-free and depicts formulations constructed according to a set of basic conventions.

Aims: We report a test of whether this method could be taught and if the quality of the resulting diagrams could be reliably rated.