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Association for Play Therapy Pandemic Needs Assessment Report
on children, parents, and families. Mental health professionals, including play therapists, inevitably were affected. In order to better understand the experience of play therapists during the COVID-19 crisis, APT conducted a needs assessment with APT members who had actively practiced play all APT members on April 12, 2022 and kept open until May 3, 2022 for answers from 284 participants below.
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Regarding the demographic background of our participants, 86% of female, and 86.6% of them held a master’s level degree. The majority of the participants reported holding either the RPT (34.5%) or RPT-S (37.3%) credential. About 34% of the participants resided in the South region of the US, followed by the North Central region of the US (29.1%). The average age of our participants was 47.6 (SD=12.6), ranging from 24 to 79 years old. Counseling (44.7%), social work (32.4%), and marriage and practice was in private practice, followed by community agency/non- the participants was 13.7 years (SD=9.3).
In terms of the impact of the pandemic on the play therapy process, 73% of the participants reported an increase of work and time that involved parents/caregivers. Not surprisingly, 66% of the participants reported the severity of child clients’ presenting issues was somewhat more severe than pre-pandemic, while 25% of the participants reported they were a lot more severe than pre-pandemic. The mental health needs of children changed as a result of the pandemic which also seems to impact the caseload of play therapists. Participants reported their caseload
14 | PLAYTHERAPY | Spetember 2022 |
www.a4pt.org | YI-JU CHENG, PHD & YUNG-WEI DENNIS LIN, PHD
n the past two years, clinicians, scholars and researchers have been paying continued attention to the impacts of the pandemic
increased by 5.36% on average (range: -100% to 100%, SD = 44.23%) in was an average increase of 26% (range: -100% to 100%, SD = 39.61%) on caseload in the second year of pandemic (from March 2021 to March 2022). Despite an overall increase, it is important to note that many the different situations faced by play therapists remain unknown and may be worth more discussion.
When asking about participants’ self-perceived competency providing (0 = did not feel competent at all and 4 = felt completely competent), pandemic and was 3.20 (range: 1-4, SD = .66) for the next year. It is encouraging to see an increase of the self-perceived competency Meanwhile, we encourage APT members to further reflect on what might have contributed to this increase and what could be done to maintain or continuously facilitate it to support our clients. Furthermore, while the pandemic has led to some changes to the modality of mental health services, in-person play therapy is the modality that the majority of the parents/caregivers (82.4%) and children (90.8%) preferred, as perceived by the participants. In-person is also the preferred modality for 86.6% of the participants. In fact, almost 60% of the participants reported the likelihood of doing mostly in-person play therapy sessions while 28.9% of the participants reported the likelihood of maintaining all in-person play therapy sessions moving forward. A question left unexplored in the survey was the factors that play therapists need to take into consideration when deciding which play therapy modality (in-person, telehealth, or a combination of both) to offer for clients.
It is worth noting that almost 40% of the participants did not answer the question inquiring about the degree to which the play therapists’
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