Psychological Therapies, Annual report on the use of IAPT services, 2020-21

This report is built from data submitted to the IAPT dataset by providers of NHS-funded psychological therapies care in England. For further information about the IAPT dataset.

In September 2020, this dataset underwent a formal version change from version 1.5 (the source of data for all previous reports from 205-16 to 2019-20) to version 2.0. As this version change happened in the middle of this annual period, a special methodology needed to be applied to this report to ensure that all records in scope were treated appropriately.

Since this annual report is a “snapshot” of the status of any referrals to IAPT services with activity in 2020-21, relevant data is present in both version 1.5 and version 2.0 of the dataset. This is illustrated by the Venn diagram below.

The two source dataset versions were used to form two annual data assets that would contain all referrals with activity in 2020-21:

• A v1.5 data asset containing referral records submitted between April 2020 and August 2020, plus associated appointments (care contacts) and patient demographics.
• A v2.0 data asset containing referral records submitted between September 2020 and March 2021, plus associated care contacts and patient demographics.

As per the Venn diagram above, the data assets were queried based on when the referral was submitted:

• Referrals that ended before September 2020 were queried solely using the version 1.5 data asset.
• Referrals that started in or after September 2020 were queried solely using the version 2.0 asset.
• Referrals that started before September 2020 and ended in or after September 2020 were queried using both assets together.

Measures in this report can broadly be categorised in two ways:

• Statistics based on counting referrals
• Statistics based on counting care contacts (appointments)

For statistics that count referrals, queries were done entirely on the version 2.0 data asset where the referral ended in or after September 2020, even if it started before September 2020. This is possible because the data asset produced by NHS Digital’s Data Processing Services includes derived fields that summarise activity across dataset versions for any referral present in dataset version 2.0. This is achieved by linkage using the Master Patient Index (MPI). Further details about this can be found in the Methodological Change Notice that accompanied the version 2.0 launch.

For statistics that count care contacts, it was necessary for NHS Digital analysts to perform a direct linkage between the two data assets to accurately count the number of relevant care contacts. This was achieved by linking the datasets using the PathwayID, which is a derived field that consistently identifies a referral across submissions. PathwayID is a combination of Person ID and local Service ID. Once the referral had been identified in both data assets, the next stage was to count the relevant care contacts in each and add them together to give the appropriate total number of contacts.