bestowing their munificence without any audit by GPs of local benefit, at a cost nationally of billions of pounds. Yet it should be a simple matter for any GP to interrogate the practice database of IAPT ‘beneficiaries’ and ask the patient the basic question ‘are you back to your usual self since seeing IAPT’? and to further determine whether recovery is stable and reliable by asking ‘for how long have you been back to your usual self?’ Then to integrate the responses with any recent record of functioning in the record of Consultations. Such data can then be presented to the local GP reps on the CCG’s to decide whether the local IAPT is value for money.
CCG’s need to move beyond simple operational matters of numbers of patients seen and waiting times, to a determination of the percentage of people recovering. The randomised controlled trials of cognitive behaviour therapy for depression and the anxiety disorders have suggested a 50% recovery rate when there has been blind assesment of patients. This was the original justification for IAPT. The suspicion is from my independent analysis of 90 IAPT cases that in routine practice the recovery rate is about 10% see link below
https://www.dropbox.com/s/flvxtq2jyhmn6i1/IAPT%20The%20Need%20for%20Radical%20Reform.pdf?dl=0
However when IAPT marks its’ own homework it miraculously comes up with a 50% recovery rate and has seduced CCGs with its own data. The response of most GPs to this is ‘give us a break, but I am nevertheless grateful for a respite from the patient if they are seeing someone else, so I can get on with my core tasks’. We need to move on to a point where GPs are to a degree advocates for their patients, if they don’t do it no one else will. Without such advocacy mental health patients become not just Cinderellas compared to patients with physical problems but confined to their own personal asylum.
It is perfectly possible transform IAPT so that it properly translates the findings of rcts into routine practice, see my trio of Simply Effective Cognitive Behaviour Therapy books published by Routledge and my last book Towards a Mental Health System that Works (2017) London; Routledge. But we need to wake up and smell the coffee.
Dr Mike Scott