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Improving Access to Psychological Therapists (IAPT) or Care Assistants?

The staffing costs of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) Programme is set to rise to £0.5 billion per year, but the National Audit Office (NAO) has failed to determine whether it is value for money. The average Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) will need to increase IAPT staffing by 60-75% to meet the 2024 NHS Access Target ,according to the updated IAPT Manual (August 2021). Currently the service employs 8000 staff, another 3,800-6,000 are ‘needed’, taking the total to between 11,800 and 14,000 in the next 3 years.  Assuming a staffing cost of £35K per employee per year and the employment of 13,000 IAPT therapists, annual staff costs will be £455 million a year i.e approximately £0.5 billion per year.  But the true cost will be even greater when overheads  such as rent, phone lines are included. Extrapolating backwards, over £5billion will have been spent on IAPT staff since its inception without independent audit and no intention of NAO audit.

But the pandemic has highlighted the shortage and poor pay of Care Assistants. Drew et al (2021) sampled IAPT therapist-client interactions https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113818 and noted a steadfast refusal to let clients tell the story behind their distress. A member of the public listening to these exchanges might contrast them with those of a Care Assistant making visits to a terminally ill patient so they can die at home with their family. The public would I think see the Care Assistant’s work as being more valuable and puzzled that the IAPT worker is paid twice as much.

There is a move to have health and social care under one umbrella, perhaps the NAO might explain why there should not be better pay for the Care Assistants and an increase in numbers at the expense of expansion of IAPT services. I came across this advert for Care Assistants in my area:

a much better investment than Talk Liverpool with a 10% recovery rate, Scott (2018) ‘IAPT- The Need for Radical Reform’ https://connection.sagepub.com/blog/psychology/2018/02/07/.

Dr Mike Scott