Telephone Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

The intervention will consist of a treatment course principally consisting of telephone administered Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Specifically it will start with a face-to-face session of 50 minutes duration at the outpatient clinic or the patient's home followed by eight scheduled weekly telephone calls of up to 30 minutes in length. The interventions include behavioural strategies such as behavioural activation, activity scheduling, relaxation training, exposure hierarchies and social skills training, as well as cognitive strategies, such as cognitive restructuring, structured problem solving and behavioural experiments. The therapist administering the telephone calls will be a registered or provisionally registered psychologist who is experienced in the delivery of telephone CBT and has knowledge of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) education. The therapist will receive supervision by one of the Associate Researchers on the project who is a Clinical Psychologist with the relevant endorsement as a supervisor. Telephone sessions with be audio recorded to facilitate supervision. Participants will undertake assessments at screening, baseline, and two follow-up assessments (one at nine weeks and 17 weeks post commencement of intervention). Assessments will consist of administration of questionnaires. The intervention will be administered in addition to the usual care received by the participants.