In my conversations with SASSI users on our free Clinical Helpline, I often run into people who have never participated in an official training led by a SASSI-certified trainer. Some of them have never been trained by anyone and are just trying to figure it out on their own or using the SASSI User Guide & Manual. Others have had a co-worker show them what they know about the instrument, sometimes inadvertently receiving misinformation or information lacking in important details. Thankfully, the SASSI was originally designed to be a simple and easy to use screening instrument that doesn’t necessarily require one to have a specific credential or college degree in order to successfully administer and score the instrument. So, anyone can easily learn to use the SASSI effectively and accurately with proper training.

I remember several years ago I was doing a training on the SASSI for a probation department and one of the attendees, who had been using the SASSI for over 10 years and who wasn’t sure why he had to be at the training, came up to me at the break and told me he had already learned several things in the first 1 ½ hours that he hadn’t known for the past ten years! He had never been to an official SASSI training done by a SASSI certified trainer until that day. For him, he was now glad he had been required to go to the training that day!

While the basics of administering and scoring the instruments are quite simple, the SASSI also has additional utility in the form of Clinical Interpretation of the Sub-Scales that can be used to help us in treatment planning, educating the client, making referrals for clients and just understanding our clients better. Like most things involving humans though, clinical interpretation can be rather complex and not as straight forward as the basics of administration and scoring. Getting good training by a SASSI-certified trainer is a first step to learning to master the interpretation of individual sub-scales on the instruments. The second step after training is to regularly utilize the free Clinical Helpline service offered by the SASSI Institute weekly M-F from 1:00pm-5:00pm EST. Through this service, callers are able to essentially extend their training on the SASSI for free and practice their clinical interpretation with SASSI clinical experts as often as they want or need each week.

So, if you’ve never been to an official SASSI-certified training or it’s been many years ago and you need to go to training again to get a “refresher,” let me encourage you to take that step in improving your knowledge base to get more out of this amazing screening instrument to better assist your clients. You can go to the Training section of the SASSI website by going here: https://sassi.com/sassi-training/. From there, you can click on United States or Canada to see if there are any trainings scheduled by state, province or region by our certified trainers; or you can click “Online” to view and register for any of our upcoming live public webinar trainings which are separated by those that are specifically for the Online/Web-based version of the SASSI and those for the traditional paper/pencil version of the SASSI. On this page you can also register for “On-Demand” recorded SASSI trainings if you don’t want to wait for a live training. The live trainings offer you the advantage of being able to interact in real time with the trainer and other participants and ask any questions you might have on the spot. The “on-demand” recordings offer the convenience of immediate viewing. Choose what works best for you but please consider getting training in an official SASSI-certified session. Who knows? You might find out some things about the SASSI you never knew that can help you use the instruments more effectively.