NHS Talking Therapies Monthly Statistics Including Employment Advisors, Performance October 2023

NHS Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression is an programme in England that offers interventions approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)¹.

The NHS Talking Therapies programme is supported by a regular return of data generated by providers of NHS Talking Therapies services in the course of delivering those services to patients. These data are received by NHS England and published in monthly reports.

This report summarises activity in the NHS Talking Therapies programme for October 2023². It shows key information about activity, patient outcomes, and waiting times.

A monthly time series of the key NHS Talking Therapies measures is also available in the Interactive dashboard for this publication.

Main findings

Information about the NHS Talking Therapies programme is based broadly on three areas:

• Outcomes: whether referrals measurably improved as a result of a course of NHS Talking Therapies therapy;

• Waiting times: how long referrals waited to be seen or treated by providers of NHS Talking Therapies services;

• Activity: such as how many referrals were received, had accessed services, or ended in the month, or how many appointments took place.

Activity

161,313 new referrals were received in October 2023.

110,160 referrals had accessed NHS Talking Therapies in the month.

153,050 referrals ended (for any reason) in the month.

Waiting times

Of the 57,517 referrals that finished a course of treatment in October 2023, 90% waited less than 6 weeks and 98.1% waited less than 18 weeks to access NHS Talking Therapies services.

Outcomes

54,347 referrals finished a course of treatment in October 2023 having started at caseness³, of which 27,058 (49.8%) moved to recovery.

¹ https://www.nice.org.uk

² All historical NHS Talking Therapies publications can be found at NHS Talking Therapies Monthly Statistics Including Employment Advisors.

³ ‘Caseness’ is the term used in NHS Talking Therapies to define a clinical case of anxiety or depression. See the ‘Guide to IAPT data and publications' published at NHS Talking Therapies data set reports for details.