NHS Talking Therapies – Data Quality Dashboard

Following an extensive engagement process, NHS England national mental health team has recently announced a new name for Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services: NHS Talking Therapies, accompanied by the following tagline: for anxiety and depression.

For further information about the name change, visit the NHS England pages What’s in a name? NHS Talking Therapies, for anxiety and depression – the new name for IAPT services.

The data set will continue to be referred to as ‘IAPT’ until the next uplift of the data set has received DAPB approval. 

This dashboard presents information about the quality of data submitted to the IAPT data set each month. This includes provider-level data quality information to help users understand the impact of local data quality issues. The purpose of this report is to support data quality improvement by making this information available in an accessible and interactive format.

Use the link above to access the interactive visualisations.

This tool is best viewed in full screen mode using the diagonal arrows in the bottom right of the visualisation.

To navigate through the tool, use the ‘Contents’ tab or use the arrows at the bottom of the screen.

To change the period shown in any time series view, select the required reporting period using either the slider bar or by left clicking on the date to bring up the calendar date selection.

To clear filtered results, hover your mouse underneath any filtered option heading to enable the ‘Clear selections’ eraser icon. Select this icon to clear previous selections and filtered results.

1. The data completion of all mandatory and required data items in the IAPT data set for each provider/region, by month.
2. The amount of data submitted to the IAPT data set with an invalid value for each provider/region, by month. Invalid values are codes entered which do not correspond to the national codes defined in the technical output specification.
3. The number of submissions made to the IAPT data set where the code submitted corresponds to a value of 'Not known', 'Unknown', 'Not Stated' or 'Other' as per the national code definition in the technical output specification.

1. Whether submissions to a specific field are appropriate or expected for a specific organisation.
2. If data submitted to a free text field is valid.
3. What invalid data is being submitted.

The IAPT data set was developed with the IAPT programme as a patient level, output based, secondary uses data set which aims to deliver robust, comprehensive, nationally consistent and comparable information for patients accessing NHS-funded NHS Talking Therapies services in England.

This national data set has been collected since April 2012 and is a mandatory submission for all NHS funded care, including care delivered by independent sector healthcare providers.

Find more information about NHS Talking Therapies.

Questions and feedback should be sent to [email protected] titled ‘Data quality dashboard’.