Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Patient Level Activity and Costing 2019-20

The Patient Level Information and Costing System (PLICS) IAPT data collection has been designed to link the costs of appointments to data from the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) data set at record level. This use of data linkage limits the burden on submitting providers by minimising the number of PLICS IAPT data items collected and ensures that a single version of activity information is used.

Further information on the IAPT data set and published IAPT data set data for 2019-20 are available from:

Information about the IAPT data set

Annual report on the use of IAPT services 2019-20

All activity included in PLICS IAPT submissions would be expected to have been submitted to the IAPT data set.

IAPT data for 2019-20 includes activity submitted by providers that were not required to submit PLICS IAPT data for this period, such as non-NHS providers and NHS providers in other sectors.

When comparing IAPT and PLICS IAPT activity counts for 2019-20 for a specific provider, please note that some activity recorded in the IAPT data set was not in scope for the PLICS IAPT collection for 2019-20.

For example, private patients, overseas visitors, patients from the devolved administrations and patients funded by the Ministry of Defence are excluded from the scope of PLICS collections.

The IAPT data set includes appointments where the patient did not attend, while the PLICS IAPT collection includes only patients who attended.

Full details of the activities in and out of scope were published in the National Cost Collection guidance.

As the submission of PLICS IAPT data was mandated for the first time for 2019-20, the quality and completeness of the linkage between PLICS IAPT and IAPT data will need to be analysed before producing analysis using the linked data.

We intend to develop analysis of linked data following publication of this report.