When ideology meets reality
What do the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng and the founding principles of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Programme (IAPT) have in common? Answer: A hopeful start, after which both have failed to survive contact with reality. The difference? One has had a vanishingly short half-life, while the other, despite recovery rates falling…
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Glimpses behind the therapy room door…
Doing effective therapy is hard enough on its own. Integrating measures of outcome into the process adds additional complexity. Do it well, and the purpose, meaning and value of using measures is integrated into conversations. Do it poorly, and we hear the crunch of gears and a trail of potential alliance fractures. As this recent…
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What actually makes therapy work?
Meet Jordan Harris, a counselor based in the US. Our previous blog was the result of an invite from Jordan to contribute to his website. Here, we return the complement and make space for a perspective from Jordan, who shares (as part of a blog series) how his approach to alliance building helps him to…
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Are You Any Good…as a Therapist?
It’s a provocative question, isn’t it? It’s also the title of a recent blog post, more of which below. Looking back at my outcomes over 25 years, the answer depends on what period I’m looking at. I know that when I’ve got complacent, or stopped looking at my data, it’s shown in my outcomes. So,…
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Learning to read data like you read sessions … (just read the book!)
In their new book Outcome Measures and Evaluation in Counselling and Psychotherapy, authors Chris Evans and Jo-anne Carlyle have pulled off a rare feat. In making some important statistical concepts accessible, presenting ‘for’ and ‘against’ arguments for measurement in a balanced way, and leading the reader through a range of implementation scenarios, they have written the…
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Can benchmarks improve IAPT performance?
It doesn’t take much digging into national IAPT 2020 – 21 data to discover big differences between service provision in different areas. In the last blog we highlighted (against a national recovery rate of 51%) the performance of Brighton and Hove (34%) and Stoke on Trent (64%) NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) . In this…
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The IAPT postcode lottery: What’s changed?
Why is the recovery rate of one IAPT area 13% higher than the national average? Why is the recovery rate of another 17% lower? And why is the recovery rate of the first almost double the second? In this first of a two-part series we drill into the data to reveal the IAPT postcode lottery.…
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Small gains disguise a miserable picture: IAPT 2020 – 21
In the face of a global pandemic, IAPT has scored some small gains in performance in the past year. Sadly, that’s in the context of a depressingly familiar pattern of high levels of attrition. Here, we present the broad findings, and profile the IAPT Interactive Dashboard that allows you to explore your local data. The…
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Made to Measure: The Strathclyde Inventory
A measure of the fully functioning person In the move to measuring outcome in routine counselling practice, there has been a tendency to lose sight of the client as a whole person, someone who (we hope) will experience growth through the process of being in counselling. Instead, we fall in line with the medical model,…
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Progress feedback: How much difference does it make?
Why all the noise about progress feedback? Back in 2003, Professor Mike Lambert and colleagues published a paper titled Is it time for clinicians to routinely track patient outcome? A meta-analysis.The paper was a meta-analytic review of three large-scale studies whose findings suggested that formally monitoring client progress had a significant impact on outcomes for…
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