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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 second round of NAPT
Data collection for the second round of the audit took
place between 1 July 2012 to 31 January 2013. The
NAPT team are now busy cleaning and analysing the data for the
different aspects of the audit: the therapist questionnaire; the
service user questionnaire; and the retrospective case record
audit. The National Report will be launched at the New
Savoy Partnership: Psychological Therapies in the NHS
conference on the 28th and 29th November 2013. At a similar
time we will be sending out organisational and service level
reports to the relevant services.
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.
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