Luciana Berger – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-02-03.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to improve the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme outcomes for the BAME population.
Alistair Burt
NHS England (NHSE) monitors clinical commissioning groups’ (CCGs) performance against the recovery target for people who have received psychological therapies through the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme. In October 2015, 77 CCGs met the 50% Recovery Standard.
The Department is working closely with NHSE to reduce the variation in recovery rates across CCG areas.
NHSE is also supporting lowest performing IAPT providers to improve their recovery rates and is offering workshops to spread good practice to all commissioners and providers.
The Government is aware of evidence that shows that people from Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities are less likely to use psychological therapies. There is ongoing activity by NHSE in collaboration with the Department to encourage access to IAPT services by the under-represented groups.
A BAME benchmarking tool has been developed and is currently being piloted by a number of IAPT services. This will assist services to improve access to people from BAME communities by helping those services understand the ethnicity of the population and whether this is reflected within the population they see. It asks services to assess whether outcomes for BAME communities are equivalent to non-BAME patients whilst also checking whether improvements for access to people from BAME communities have been made and specific training for therapists have been utilised. Once pilots are complete NHS England will publish the benchmarking tool for all services to access.
Equality of access is an issue for wider mental health services and that is why the Mental Health Partnership Board is considering the issues around equality of access in mental health services, which includes the IAPT programme.
The Health and Social Care Information Centre publish referrals and outcomes data by ethnic groups. NHSE intends to compare those numbers with BAME prevalence population data to highlight referrals and access rates for ethnic groups at CCG level. CCGs are responsible for taking the necessary actions to address any disparity.
