Major New Training Program to Expand Psychological Therapies Workforce
Thursday 03 April 2008Comment on this article Permlink
Government sets out plans (26 February 2008) to deliver £170 million investment in talking therapies.
Health Secretary Alan Johnson unveiled plans for a major new programme to train an extra 3,600 Psychological Therapists.
The £170 million ‘Improving Access to Psychological Therapies’ programme is designed to help transform the lives of thousands of people with depression and anxiety disorders by offering them access to Cognitive Behavioural Therapies.
Improving access to psychological therapies is a Government priority and evidence shows therapy is as effective as drugs in the short-term and longer lasting in the long-term.
NICE guidelines on treatment for depression and anxiety recommend psychological therapies as part of evidence-based stepped care.
The ‘Improving Access to Psychological Therapies’ programme will train a new workforce of therapists at two levels who will deliver:
- high intensity therapy for people with moderate to severe conditions
- low intensity therapy for people with mild to moderate conditions.
By 2010/11, the NHS will spend £170m per year on psychological therapies, with more than £30m in 2008/09 and more than £100m in 2009/10.
Over the next three years, this investment in Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) will mean:
- 900,000 more people treated for depression and anxiety
- 450,000 of them are likely to be completely cured (as expected with NICE guidelines)
- 25,000 fewer people with mental health problems on sick pay and benefits
- 3,600 more newly trained psychological therapists giving evidence-based treatment
- all GP practices having access to psychological therapies as the programme rolls out.
Mental health problems are the largest single cause of disability and illness in England – accounting for:
- 40% of all disability (physical and mental)
- nearly 40% of people on Incapacity Benefit (and a secondary factor for 10% more of them)
- a third of all GPs’ time.
About 1 in 6 UK adults has a common mental health condition (i.e. depression or anxiety disorders) and an estimated 91m working days a year are lost to mental illness.
The Government has set an aspiration to raise the number of working age adults in employment from 75-80% of the working age population, and has a target to reduce the number of people on Incapacity Benefit.
The two national IAPT demonstration sites at Newham and Doncaster have achieved:
- impressive recovery rates that replicate clinical trial and are in line with NICE guidelines (50-60% on most rigorous measures)
- excellent recording of treatment outcomes for the first time in mental health (90%), leading to an opportunity for a nationwide system of routine outcomes monitoring and thus to more improvements
- significant achievement in helping people off statutory sick pay and back to work/volunteering/education/training
- treating large numbers of people in a short period of time from a standing start – more than 1,000 in Newham and more than 4,000 in Doncaster
- meeting previously unidentified and unmet need by opening to self-referral – in Newham’s community people came forward who were just as ill as those referred by GPs and whose conditions were twice as chronic (four years long rather than two). They responded as well as those referred by GPs.
The additional funding from the Comprehensive Spending Review 2007 will pay for the major training programme that provides the necessary number of suitably trained therapists and enables progressive expansion of NICE-compliant local Psychological Therapies services.
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