Our significant investment in the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme (IAPT),
will see annual funding rising to £173 million, 3,600 extra therapists trained and 900,000 more people treated by 2011.
This investment in IAPT will help to add to the existing provision of psychological therapies,
increase capacity, reduce waiting times and drive up quality standards".
IAPT = Improving Access to Psychological Therapy - goverment accepted the programme pushed by Professor Layard - an economist.
An e- letter in the Psychiatrist
' In 2008 Professor Glenys Parry was undertaking a £480,000 study of 2 pilot programmes- in Doncaster and Newham.
A BMJ report has just reprised her findings, which seem at odds with continued governmental support for APT at a time of widespread cuts in NHS budgets.
Indeed the Department of Health’s supporting documents carry 90 references but strangely omit the Parry study.
Parry found little difference between the IAPT sites and the comparator PCT services. What differences there were in outcomes were not significant 4 months after treatment and had disappeared at 8 months. IAPT treatments cost more, not less, than those provided in neighbouring boroughs.
So the service cost more and failed to deliver significant improvements, the opposite of what Layard and his proponents were claiming.
A study in 2010 by the North East Public Health Observatory showed that in the first 32 IAPT sites only about half all referrals even had an initial assessment, and more than one third of those taken on only attended one session.
Only 1.4% of the supposedly serious cases met NICE guidelines of 16-20 sessions.
This also begs questions about the economic calculations behind IAPT, since these are based on 80% of patients completing treatment.
IAPT also trumpeted the impact it would have in getting people back to work. These figures alone make this claim seem vainglorious.'
This is the answer
Cognitive Behavior Therapy described