Psychological Therapies: reports on the use of IAPT services, England September 2020 Final including report on the EA in IAPT pilot

NHS Digital also publishes a wide range of information about activity in the IAPT programme within the month.

The chart below shows the relative volumes of referrals that were received, entered treatment, ended, and finished a course of treatment in each month.

There is a degree of seasonality in these volumes, with slightly less activity around December and higher activity where there are more  working days in the month such as July. Note that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the number of referrals to IAPT services from March 2020 onwards. 

It is important to note that these numbers are not based on the same group of referrals as each other. A referral that was received in September 2020 did not necessarily enter treatment in this month, and is less likely again to have ended in the month.

The number of referrals that finished a course of treatment is a subset of all referrals that ended in the month. In September 2020, 43.5% of referrals that ended had finished a course of IAPT treatment. Referrals can end having had different levels of contact with the service; these are shown in the chart below.

Each quarter, more detailed data are published about activity. The most recent quarterly data, Quarter 1 2020/21³, can be found at: http://digital.nhs.uk/pubs/iaptjun20. The first quarterly data from v2.0 of the IAPT dataset will be released in March 2021 and will cover the period October 2020 - December 2020. 

³Percentages for each variable will not sum to 100% as a subgroup was either not recorded or was recorded using an invalid code for some records.