Luciana Berger – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-03-01.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the progress of the Children and Young People’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme’s service transformation programme.

Alistair Burt

The Government’s transformation programme for children and young people’s mental health is aimed at improving children and young people’s mental health and providing additional support for those who experience mental health problems. The Children and Young People’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (CYP IAPT) programme includes training for professionals working in child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) partnerships to put the patient at the centre of their treatment: young people agree goals and milestones with the professional, and participate in their care through regular feedback and outcome monitoring. The benefits of this approach are well-evidenced.

Unlike the adult programme, CYP IAPT does not create new services; it transforms CAMHS partnerships by training people to deliver evidence-based interventions so that those working in CAMHS do so in collaboration with children, young people and families, in every aspect of care and service design through better participation and regular feedback and outcome monitoring.

At present, 78% of young people aged under 19 are covered by CAMHS partnerships which are working to transform services by embedding the CYP IAPT principles, and the programme is being rolled out to cover the whole of England by 2018. The programme is currently developing a number of new curricula to address training gaps that have been identified during its implementation. These include interventions for 0-5 year olds, evidence-based counselling, combination therapy (pharmacology and psychological interventions), Learning Disabilities and Autistic Spectrum disorder, and staff working in inpatient settings.

A recent rapid deep dive audit of 12 partnerships within the programme showed:

― improved access through self-referral routes, single point of access, outreach services, evening and weekend appointments;

― compared to a national sample of mental health services in the United States, teams in services working with CYP IAPT had more proficient organisational cultures and more functional organisations;

― more efficient time between referral and assessment decreased by 73%;

― number of days between assessment and discharge decreased by 21%; and

― The percentage of closed cases by mutual agreement increased by 22%.