Holly Lynch – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Holly Lynch on 2016-02-24.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the average waiting times are for access to talking therapies in (a) the UK, (b) Yorkshire and (c) Halifax.

Alistair Burt

We do not hold the data in the format requested. What data we do hold is provided in the following table:

The number of referrals entering treatment¹ in the year, with mean and median waiting times to first treatment (days), for Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services in 2014/15. Data shown for NHS Calderdale Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and all Yorkshire CCGs combined².

¹In order to enter treatment a referral must have a first treatment appointment (an appointment with a therapy type recorded) in the year.

²CCG is based on general practitioner (GP) Practice. Where GP Practice is not recorded, or cannot be assigned to a CCG, the referral is categorised as ‘Unknown’.

³In order to enter treatment a referral must have a first treatment appointment in the year.

⁴The mean was used as the average.

⁵Means and medians have been rounded to the nearest whole number.

Notes:

Waiting time is measured by counting the number of days between a referral being received and the first treatment appointment. For 2014/15, the presence of a valid therapy type is used as an indicator of whether treatment was provided in the course of the appointment.

Entering treatment figures are rounded to the nearest 5.

It is generally advised that the median is used as the more reliable measure of average waiting time, as this accounts better for any outliers in the data.

Source: IAPT