About

Making the work visible

I'm a clinical psychologist. For more than twenty years, almost everything I've done comes back to one question: how do we know therapy is working, and what do we do when it isn't?

It's been a career of parallel streams rather than a straight line: hospital research, private practice, training, business, and the occasional fight on behalf of the profession. This is how they connect.

Starting with the numbers

I started in research. After my PhD at Griffith University, I spent most of the 2000s at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital, building ways to measure whether mental health services were doing what they claimed. I co-founded the hospital's applied research and evaluation centre and managed a national NHMRC project tracking how early psychosis services across five states were really performing.

It was a long way from hard-edged lab science, and it taught me the thing I've built everything on since: benchmarking, indicators and quality assurance only work when clinicians can see the data and trust what it's for.

Why I started measuring in private practice

When I moved into private practice, the thing that struck me was how invisible the work was. We all saw our clients, wrote our notes and went home, and nobody really knew whose clients were getting better. That wasn't the fault of the practice I worked in. It's how the system is built. But coming from a world where everything was measured, it felt strange.

So I went looking for a better way. I trained in feedback-informed therapy, including a week-long intensive with Scott Miller in Chicago, and became a certified trainer with the International Center for Clinical Excellence. I started tracking every client, every session.

It soon became clear that doing this in someone else's practice was too small, and that it wasn't fair to ask an owner to run their business around my ideas. In 2013, my wife Rebecca (also a clinical psychologist with a PhD, and the sharpest operator I know) and I started Benchmark Psychology.

Benchmark: a practice built on outcome data

For more than a decade, every psychologist at Benchmark tracked outcomes with every client. We made the results visible, inside the practice and publicly, and used deliberate practice to lift everyone's results, mine included.

That work produced the DASS-10, a brief measure built for session-by-session tracking, developed with Professor Kim Halford and made free for every psychologist. It has since been translated into several languages. Our practice data also contributed to the national evaluation of Better Access. Rebecca and I sold the practice in 2024.

Training the people who train

Training has always been the part of the work I love most. In 2011 I was asked to become lead trainer for STAP, the Supervisor Training & Approval Program. It had a proud history, and it needed someone to take it forward just as supervisor approval became a national requirement. Since then I've trained thousands of Australian psychologists to become supervisors, and Benchmark took over running STAP from Griffith University in 2019.

PREP, the Psychology Registrar Endorsement Program, was Rebecca's idea. We had trained so many registrars inside Benchmark that she saw the chance to build a finishing school for clinical psychology. We opened it to registrars everywhere, partly for commercial reasons, and partly because we'd learned that supervising people you employ is complicated. Owners deserve a way to give their registrars great supervision and training from someone other than themselves.

In 2024 I was named Educator of the Year at the Allied Health Awards.

After Benchmark

Since selling the practice, Rebecca and I have become the people practice owners call when they want to know how to run a practice well. PractAus exists to support them, with practical training in ethics, governance, risk and the business of psychology. And Find a Supervisor makes approved supervisors visible and searchable, so the good ones are easy to find.

When the profession needs a voice

I'm not a natural politician, but I get louder when the politics get ugly. In 2010 I set up the QLD Clinical Psychology Facebook group as a rallying point for the profession. It has grown to more than 2,000 members and has been used for advocacy ever since. I served a three-year term as a member-elected non-executive director of the Australian Psychological Society, gave expert advice to the Productivity Commission's mental health inquiry, and in early 2020 pushed hard for psychologists to be funded to work by telehealth.

Writing is part of that too. Some of what I write is practical, some is advocacy, and some is me thinking out loud. It's all on the writing page.

What I do now

Clinical supervision, consultation for health organisations and practice owners, and training. Seeservices or get in touch.

The businesses