How are they doing getting people into talking therapies?

Well if you look at the facts and figures the NHS is putting out

http://www.ic.nhs.uk/statistics-and-data-collections/mental-health/nhs-specialist-mental-health-services/improving-access-to-psychological-therapies-key-performance-indicators-iapt-kpis-q1-apr-2011--jun-2011

You may well be unimpressed, I certainly was however I find myself really looking at the figures and wondering

What were they like before the new and improved push to get people into therapy?

Guess we’ll never really know however I’m not sure that this data as it stands is really telling us anything other than a general snap shot of how things are and even then I found it difficult to get anything meaningful from it.

For instance they quote:

·        210,540 people were referred for psychological therapies

·        123,975 entered treatment

which might lead you to conclude that 58.8% of people who were referred in this quarter actually started treatment in this quarter however there is no way to calculate if that is true from the data.

Roughly 44% of people starting therapy had waited longer than 28 days to start treatment (range 0-150%)seem riduclous....

As a statistic maybe but what it does highlight is that for some PCTs they are actually making inroads into their waiting list as they have more people entering therapy than were referred in that.

42% recovery rate based on the percentage of people who tested not ‘caseness’ at the end of their treatment but this is a one off questionnaire based on the last weeks levels of feelings. The science backs it up as being a good indicator or whether people need therapy great, however completing treatment only requires people to have attended 2 sessions (not including the assessment). How much therapy can be done in 2 sessions I wonder? Certainly not a great deal if any, yet they’re using this as their bench mark. It seems ridiculous.

And as has been quoted(I think for shock value)-

http://www.hi-mag.com/health-insurance/product-area/occupational-health/article380604.ece

 the range is 5.6-134.4%

However I do not consider this an accurate picture of the recovery rate

This is of course an ongoing data collection and with successive submissions the bigger picture will be seen more clearly and I am interested in how the overall recovery rates and waiting times come down, however I am deeply concerned that very little analysis or explanation of the data has been done, for instance the basic percentage of how many people entering therapy have waited longer than 28 days.

Why are 2 sessions or more considered to be completed therapy?

Equally does attending more sessions improve the recovery rate?

And what about a breakdown for the different therapies since some of them last 16 sessions and some over 80sessions.

And then given that you have the caseness scores surely looking at whether the severity of score and the different treatment plans and how many they attended and the change in the scores would be illuminating.

Caseness – A patient is deemed to be at caseness when suffering from depression and/or anxiety disorders, as determined by scores on the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ9) for depression and/or the Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD7) for anxiety disorders, or other anxiety disorder specific measure as appropriate for the patient’s diagnosis.

Yes and doesn’t my scientist background really show through now?

So can’t wait for the next instalment to see what happens.

Will things get any better or should I move to Southampton PCT or Lambeth or Walsall Teaching where currently I can be seen within 28 and recovery is estimated at 50-51%?