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10-minute CBT: The BITS™ Course.
Turning everyday conversations into therapeutic interventions.
The BITS™ Course is a 2-day course from the Association for Psychological Therapies (APT). The course shows how brief everyday conversations can become powerful therapeutic interventions.
This course has built-in APT Accreditation and automatic access to our renowned post-course resources to help you support your clients. It is available for both teams and individuals, face-to-face or online, and can also count towards The APT Diploma in Psychological Therapies, Risk Diploma, Forensic Diploma, and the Extended Training in CBT course.
Executive Summary
There are 168 hours in a week.
A patient might receive less than one hour of formal therapy.
What happens in the other 167 hours — on the ward, during routine interactions, while walking to lunch, or during brief conversations with staff — can have a profound effect on recovery.
Many professionals working in mental health and related services spend large amounts of time talking with patients, but these conversations often remain informal and unstructured.
The BITS™ approach shows how these brief interactions can be used far more effectively.
It provides simple, practical psychological frameworks that help staff turn everyday conversations into purposeful and therapeutic exchanges, while still keeping them natural and informal.
In short, the course shows how to embed psychological therapy into everyday care.
Who should attend this course?
This course is particularly relevant for professionals who:
- Work with patients throughout the day, rather than in formal therapy sessions.
- Want to make their everyday interactions more therapeutic and purposeful.
- Would like practical psychological tools that can be used in brief conversations.
Typical attendees include:
- Mental health nurses.
- Support workers and residential staff.
- Occupational therapists.
- Social workers.
- Community mental health practitioners.
- Rehabilitation and forensic staff.
- GPs and other healthcare professionals who have limited time with patients.
In many services there are highly skilled professionals who spend many hours with patients, yet their therapeutic expertise is often under-used simply because the setting does not allow for formal therapy sessions.
This course is designed to change that.
What the course teaches
The BITS™ approach shows how brief conversations — sometimes lasting only a few minutes — can still produce meaningful therapeutic progress.
Participants learn how to structure short interactions so that they remain informal and natural, but also purposeful and psychologically informed.
The course introduces two key practical frameworks.
A simple structure for therapeutic conversations
A clear, easy-to-remember structure helps ensure that even brief interactions include the essential elements of effective helping:
- Forming and maintaining a good therapeutic relationship.
- Listening empathically.
- Validating the patient’s experiences.
- Encouraging constructive action between conversations.
This structure allows conversations to remain natural and friendly, while still producing therapeutic benefit.
A practical CBT framework for guiding change
The course also introduces a simple mnemonic based on core CBT principles, helping professionals quickly consider the key factors that influence mental health:
- Behaviour.
- Biological factors such as sleep and lifestyle.
- Emotions.
- Social surroundings and environment.
- Thinking style.
This framework allows staff to suggest small, realistic steps that patients can take between conversations — often the most powerful part of any intervention.
The benefits of this approach
The BITS™ approach helps professionals:
- Use brief interactions more effectively.
- Make their work more psychologically informed.
- Encourage small but meaningful changes in patients’ daily lives.
- Maintain a natural conversational style while still working in a structured way.
- Document and evidence therapeutic progress appropriately.
For many services this approach helps ensure that therapeutic care is not confined to the therapy room, but becomes part of everyday practice.
What you receive from attending the training
After attending the course you will:
- Receive Level 1 APT-Accreditation in the BITS™ approach.
- Receive a certificate confirming your training.
- Gain access to APT’s downloadable resources associated with the course.
- Have the option to take an online exam to gain Level 2 APT-Accreditation.
Your registration lasts indefinitely, while accreditation lasts for three years and can be renewed.
APT accreditation is based on the consistent evaluations of the professionals who attend its courses. Over 150,000 professionals have attended APT training, which is used by most NHS mental health trusts and many independent providers.
Booking is easy...
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CBT Courses and Resources
How to become a CBT therapist ❯
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy ❯
10-minute CBT: The BITS™ Course ❯
Working with Anger and Violence ❯
Working with Alcohol & Substance Misuse ❯
Trauma-Focused CBT, for all ages ❯
The ADDRESS® Course for working with Personality Disorder ❯
CBT for Non-Suicidal Self-Injury ❯
CBT for Working with Offenders ❯
Feedback Ratings.
We continuously monitor the quality of our training by obtaining feedback on the two key scales of relevance and presentation from every course delegate. Below are the average ratings for the last ten runnings of this course, which are updated periodically.
Face-to-Face
Presentation: 98%
Relevance: 95%
Reviews.
APT prides itself on the feedback we receive about our courses. Below are just some of the great comments the 'The BITS™ Course' has received.
“Without a doubt one of the most motivating and interesting courses I have ever done in some time.”
“Exceptional training - interesting and worthwhile, presented in an understandable way and with the focus upon how to use it in a practical way in our work place. Most useful.”
