Improving access - plans revealedEmerging details regarding the government’s continued investment in the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme show that psychologists are at the heart of the new plans (tinyurl.com/2dhs38).
Last November Health Secretary Alan Johnson announced £170 million of extra investment in psychological services, including the training of an extra 3600 therapists. Now new documents have been published showing who these therapists are expected to be and how they will be trained, together with information on how the IAPT services will be organised.
In line with a stepped-care approach, some of the new therapists will offer ‘low-intensity’ help, including guided self-help and computerised CBT. These therapists will come from a range of backgrounds, including psychology graduates, and will be trained, at an undergraduate or postgraduate level as appropriate, on a one-day-a-week, one-year course.
Other therapists will offer ‘high intensity’ interventions, including face-to-face CBT for anxiety and depression. They will be postgraduates, including clinical psychologists and psychotherapists, and their training - a postgraduate diploma or equivalent - will involve a two-days-a-week, one-year course.
Strategic health authorities are being invited to commission their share of training places now, for the training to begin in September this year.
The Department of Health’s implementation plan adds: ‘Some therapists will of course already be in post or available on the open market, working in either the private sector or the NHS (many as clinical psychologists). The programme will draw on these therapists in order to start delivering the services and provide initial leadership. It is envisaged that when the new service is complete in, say, six years’ time, the majority of the staff will be "new", that is, people who have been trained for the purpose since 2008.’
The new IAPT services are expected to take referrals from GPs and self-referrals; to be located in GPs’ surgeries, job centres and voluntary organisations but also with a central base; and they are expected to monitor their outcomes. CJ
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