Psychological Therapies (IAPT) is an NHS programme in England that offers interventions approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)¹, for treating people with depression or anxiety.
The IAPT programme is supported by a regular return of data generated by providers of IAPT services in the course of delivering those services to patients. These data are received by NHS Digital and published in monthly reports.
This report summarises activity in the IAPT programme for December 2020². It shows key information about activity, patient outcomes, and waiting times.
A monthly time series of the key IAPT measures is also available in the Interactive dashboard for this publication.
Main findings
Information about the IAPT programme is based broadly on three areas:
• Outcomes: whether referrals measurably improved as a result of a course of IAPT therapy;
• Waiting times: how long referrals waited to be seen or treated by providers of IAPT services;
• Activity: such as how many referrals were received, treated, or ended in the month, or how many appointments took place.
Activity
115,671 new referrals were received in December 2020.
81,699 referrals entered treatment in the month.
115,378 referrals ended (for any reason) in the month.
Waiting times
Of the 48,111 referrals that finished a course of treatment in December 2020, 92.8% waited less than 6 weeks and 98.5% waited less than 18 weeks to enter treatment.
Outcomes
45,264 referrals finished a course of treatment in December 2020 having started at caseness³, of which 23,291 (51.6%) moved to recovery.
¹ https://www.nice.org.uk/
² All historical IAPT publications can be found at http://www.digital.nhs.uk/iaptreports.
³ ‘Caseness’ is the term used in IAPT to define a clinical case of anxiety or depression. See the ‘Guide to IAPT data and publications' published at http://www.digital.nhs.uk/iaptreports for details.