The Care Quality Commission (CQC) pay unannounced visits to establishments for vulnerable people and have thereby revealed tragedies such as Winterbourne View in 2011. But the clients of IAPT are no less vulnerable, yet there is no inspection on their behalf. I wonder what the CQC would make of a lady on the autistic spectrum accepted into IAPT for management of her anxiety, catered for by a high intensity therapist who is allowed only 6 sessions, with no knowledge of autism or of the grey are between OCD rituals and aspects of autism. The CQC would surely cry foul, but this is not an isolated example.
If IAPT practitioners are to be based in GP practices they could fall within the CQC’s orbit of ‘people with poor mental health’. Had they visited the establishment where the would be Bake Off winner, Kim-Joy https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/nov/12/i-was-preety-much-mute-at-school-the-bake-offs-kim-joy worked they would have heard her tell, that she has a Master’s in psychology, she could provide only up to 6 half hour sessions in low intensity and was heading off to other pastures. If they needed an independent window on what is going on in IAPT I would have given them the following comments from amongst the 90 clients that I saw:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/flvxtq2jyhmn6i1/IAPT%20The%20Need%20for%20Radical%20Reform.pdf?dl=0
There are valuable TV programmes such as ‘GPs Behind Closed Doors’, I wonder what the public would make of ‘;IAPT Behind Closed Doors’ but such a programme would have to escape censorship by NHS England (and IAPT leadership) something GPs would not tolerate.
Dr Mike Scott