Psychological Therapies: reports on the use of IAPT services, England March 2020 Final including reports on the IAPT pilots and Quarter 4 2019-20 data

Psychological Therapies (IAPT) is an NHS programme in England that offers interventions approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)¹ for treating people with depression or anxiety.

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

This report summarises activity in the IAPT programme for March 2020². It shows key information about activity, patient outcomes, and waiting times.

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

Main findings

Information about the IAPT programme is based broadly on three areas:

• Outcomes: whether referrals measurably improved as a result of a course of IAPT therapy;
• Waiting times: how long referrals waited to be seen or treated by providers of IAPT services;
• Activity: such as how many referrals were received, treated, or ended in the month, or how many appointments took place.

Activity

108,330 new referrals were received in March 2020.

96,046 referrals entered treatment in the month.

158,996 referrals ended (for any reason) in the month.

Waiting times

Of the 58,050 referrals that finished a course of treatment in March 2020, 87.1% waited less than 6 weeks and 97.7% waited less than 18 weeks to enter treatment.

Outcomes

54,512 referrals finished a course of treatment in March 2020 having started at caseness³, of which 26,004 (47.7%) moved to recovery.

 ¹ https://www.nice.org.uk/
 ² All historical IAPT publications are available. 
 ³ ‘Caseness’ is the term used in IAPT to define a clinical case of anxiety or depression. See the ‘Guide to IAPT data and publications.