Quick links
What is the National Audit of
Psychological Therapies?
The National Audit of Psychological
Therapies for Anxiety and Depression aims to promote access,
appropriateness, acceptability and positive outcomes of treatment
for those suffering from depression and anxiety.
The audit is open to all NHS-funded
services in England and Wales providing psychological therapies in
the community for people with anxiety and depression. It includes
adults over the age of 18 who are receiving psychological therapy
services in the community. The audit is working with both IAPT and
non-IAPT sites.
It engages healthcare professionals in
a systematic evaluation of their clinical practice against
standards for best practice. Local services are able to benchmark
their performance and identify where they are performing well, and
where there is potential to improve the quality of treatment and
care they provide. Services are also encouraged to engage in action
planning to improve their practice or maintain existing good
practice. On a national level, wide participation in the audit also
creates an overview of the quality of care being provided in
England and Wales.
The National Audit of Psychological
Therapies (NAPT) is funded by the Healthcare Quality Improvement
Partnership (HQIP) and is an initiative of the College Centre for
Quality Improvement (CCQI). The project is part of the National
Clinical Audit programme and trusts are required by the Department
of Health to report their participation in the audit in their
Quality Account.
Why focus on Psychological
Therapies?
The importance of the
provision of psychological therapy services has received increasing
attention over recent years and continues to do so. Some of the
most significant factors to have influenced policy over the past
decade include:
- Concerns about access to services
- Recommendations from the National Institute of Health and
Clinical Excellence (NICE) on the use of evidence-based
psychological therapies
- The economic argument for improved access (the ‘Layard
Report’)
- The development of the Improving Access to Psychological
Therapies (IAPT) Programme.
The growing recognition of
the importance of psychological therapy, coupled with concerns
about access to services, led to the Healthcare Quality Improvement
Partnership (HQIP) requesting the Royal College of Psychiatrists’
Centre for Quality Improvement (CCQI) to conduct a National Audit
of Psychological Therapies. The remit of NAPT was to provide the
first comprehensive measurement of NHS-funded services providing
psychological therapies for people with anxiety and depression in
England and Wales. The baseline audit showed that while performance
was good overall for most standards, there was considerable
variation for some standards.
Following the success
of the baseline audit therefore, HQIP agreed to fund the
National Audit of Psychological Therapies for a re-audit. It is
hoped that this will show improvements in performance against the
audit standards where this is needed.
The re-audit
We are currently recruiting for the
re-audit, and data collection will begin in July 2012. The
re-audit will be open both to services which participated in the
baseline, and those which did not.
The NAPT team are carefully
considering feedback from the services which participated in the
baseline audit, in order to ensure that the re-audit builds on the
work of the baseline, and that data collection is as
straightforward as possible.
The NAPT team will be contacting
services which participated in the baseline audit to ask them to
re-register. They will also be contacting CEOs and MDs of mental
health trusts; and contacting voluntary services across England and
Wales.
Services are asked to register for the
re-audit by 18 May 2012. Please click on the link below to
register:
The baseline audit
Data collection took place between
June 2010 and February 2011, and involved 357 psychological therapy
services in England and Wales. This included both primary and
secondary care, small and large services, and IAPT and non-IAPT
services.
The data were then analysed, and the
findings published in November 2011. The National Report was
launched at the New Savoy: Psychological Therapies in the NHS
Conference on 24 November.
For the key findings of the audit,
please see the reports in the ‘Baseline Audit Reports’ section at
the right of this page.
Services which
participated in the audit also received individual service reports
and action planning toolkits. Services were encouraged to return
completed action plans to the NAPT team. A number of dissemination
and action planning events have also recently been taking place in
various regions of England and Wales.
|