Psychological Therapies: reports on the use of IAPT services, England, October 2021 Final including a report on the IAPT Employment Advisers pilot

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 October 2021². 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, had accessed services, or ended in the month, or how many appointments took place.

Activity

152,003 new referrals were received in October 2021.

102,990 referrals had accessed IAPT in the month.

140,054 referrals ended (for any reason) in the month.

Waiting times

Of the 53,776 referrals that finished a course of treatment in October 2021, 91.2% waited less than 6 weeks and 98.6% waited less than 18 weeks to access IAPT services.

Outcomes

50,711 referrals finished a course of treatment in October 2021 having started at caseness³, of which 25,018 (49.3%) moved to recovery.



¹ https://www.nice.org.uk/

² All historical IAPT publications are available. 

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' for details.