Quick links   

• NAPT second round national report 2013
• NAPT second round results
• Second round audit tools (2012-2013) 
• What is the National Audit of Psychological Therapies?
• Why focus on Psychological Therapies?
• The baseline audit 
• Baseline audit reports
• Accreditation Programme for Psychological Therapies Services (APPTS) 
• Links to other NAPT pages

What is the National Audit of Psychological Therapies?

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 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 in performance between services 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 National Report was launched at the New Savoy Partnership: Psychological Therapies in the NHS conference on 28 and 29 November 2013. 

We have also sent out organisational and service level reports to the relevant services. 

A number of regional dissemination and action planning events have also been taking place since December 2013 in various parts of England and Wales.

• Second round national reports are available on the Findings from second round page

The baseline audit

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 also took place in 2011 - 12 in various regions of England and Wales.

• Baseline reports are available on the Baseline Audit Resources page