Pilot of the National Audit of Psychological Therapies (2009)

Purpose of the Pilot

A pilot of the national audit was undertaken between September and December 2009, to support the programme to develop simple but robust audit tools and audit methodology that could be used to collect data across a wide range of settings in the national rollout of the audit in 2010.

Services involved

26 services in 8 lead organisations in England and Wales participated, including voluntary sector, Black and Minority Ethnic, IAPT, Older People’s, group therapy, art therapy, computerised CBT, secondary care and primary care services. There was a good demographic spread of services in both rural and urban areas in England and Wales.

Data collected

Several different types of data were collected:

• The audit of consecutive referrals collected data on all people referred for and starting treatment with psychological services. Data was collected mainly on equity of access, waiting times, the types of therapy delivered and outcome scores.
• Service users were invited to fill in a questionnaire about their satisfaction with the service. A measure of Therapeutic Alliance, the ARM-5 (Agnew Relationship Measure) was also filled out by service users.
• Therapists completed  a questionnaire about their professional background and qualifications.
• We also collected contextual data about the services that are offered by each participating service, including the range of treatment modalities offered.
  

 Data collection for the pilot phase of the audit was completed in January 2010.

Outcomes from the pilot

The pilot provided valuable feedback to inform the national audit, helping us to refine our questionnaires and procedures.  The project team produced reports for the participating services to allow them to look at their performance in the four dimensions of quality: access, appropriateness, acceptability and outcomes.