in a blog written just before the demise of Public Health England I noted the’Breathtaking Naivety of Public Health England On Mental Health’, https://wp.me/p8O4Fm-2HI. My hope is that its’ replacement the National Institute of Health Protection (NIHP) will question why £4billion of the taxpayers money has been spent on the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) Programme, without any publicly funded independent evaluation of the service. My own independent finding was that only 10% of those going through the IAPT service recover and that the public are very dissatisfied https://connection.sagepub.com/blog/psychology/2018/02/07/on-sage-insight-improving-access-to-psychological-therapies-iapt-the-need-for-radical-reform/ ,. By contrast IAPT claims a 50% recovery rate, but my just published paper in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjc.12264#.XzwEMhZvXuk.email casts serious doubts on the Services claim.
I have written to Baroness Harding of Winscombe, Dido Harding, the head of NIHP to clarify whether the NIHP is indeed going to be the monitor of IAPT’s performance and if not who is? I have also stressed that no agency, including IAPT, should be allowed to mark its’ own homework. It is imperative that a the metric for gauging the effectiveness of a service is one that the general public would recognise as meaningful, such as being independently assessed as no longer suffering from the disorder that they first presented with, as opposed to a surrogate measure, such as a change of score on a psychometric test completed in the presence of the therapist.
As MPs resume sitting in Parliament it is critical to ask who will now be in charge of ensuring IAPT does what it says on the tin and how will this QUANGO be made accountable?
Dr Mike Scott