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Publication, Part of

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

Official statistics, Experimental statistics

IAPT Enter Treatment Rolling Quarter Report

An issue has been identified with the data in the IAPT Enter Treatment Rolling Quarter Report. This issue is being investigated and the file will be made available as soon as possible.

Please note the timeseries data in this publication was updated on 11 March 2022 to include revised data, for some providers, for the period September 2020 to May 2021. The core data for October 2021 is unaffected. This is following a one-off resubmission exercise that took place in August 2021 and covered the data period September 2020 to May 2021 inclusive.

18 January 2022 00:00 AM

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Waiting Times

One of the stated targets of the IAPT programme is that for referrals finishing a course of treatment in the month, 75% access services within 6 weeks, and 95% within 18 weeks⁵. These are based on the waiting time between the referral date and the first attended treatment appointment.

91.2% of referrals waited less than 6 weeks to access IAPT services.

Calculating Waiting Times

In October 2021, this calculation is performed as follows: 

(Count_FirstTreatment6WeeksFinishedCourseTreatment / Count_FinishedCourseTreatment) * 100

(49,029 / 53,776) * 100 = 91.2%

Sub-national waiting times rates are published in the Monthly Activity Data File as columns ‘Percentage_FirstTreatment6WeeksFinishedCourseTreatment’ and ‘Percentage_FirstTreatment18WeeksFinishedCourseTreatment’.


The chart below shows that, nationally, waiting times measures have consistently been above the target, particularly the proportion seen within 6 weeks.


For an explanation of the terms used and further information about how measures are calculated in IAPT see the 'Guide to IAPT data and publications' at  www.digital.nhs.uk/iaptreports.

⁵ See p16-17 of The Mandate: A mandate from the Government to NHS England: April 2015 to March 2016, available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/386221/NHS_England_Mandate.pdf



Last edited: 21 September 2023 5:07 pm