Reliable Improvement

What this data shows:

This indicator shows the proportion of people who have shown a reliable degree of improvement.  This is important as it shows all the people whose symptoms have improved over the course of treatment, including those in whom the improvement fell short of full recovery.

How the data is gathered:

Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) is an NHS programme which provides services across England offering low and high intensity interventions approved by the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for treating people with depression and anxiety disorders. These treatments include:

  • Guided self-help and other low-intensity interventions
  • Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
  • Interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT)
  • Brief dynamic interpersonal therapy (DIT)
  • Couple therapy for depression
  • Counselling for depression
  • Eye-movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR therapy)

Psychological therapies involve working with a trained professional to understand and deal with emotional and mental health problems. Therapy starts with a detailed assessment that aims to identify the main problems that are currently holding people back in their lives. These can be discussed confidentially with the professional who has been trained to listen attentively and to respect your feelings without judging. In addition to providing an opportunity to talk, a psychological therapist help you learn new ways of managing your problems. For further detailed information on the Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme please visit the website at http://www.iapt.nhs.uk/

Improvement in a person's mental health condition after a course of IAPT treatment is measured based on the person's outcome scores from the depression and anxiety questionnaires (PHQ-9 and ADSM). These questionnaires are taken at the start and end of treatment, and can be compared to show the change in a person's symptoms over this time. A statistically significant figure is used for each questionnaire to work out whether a person's condition improved by a significantly large margin to be considered "reliable". Reliable improvement is likely to lead to longer term improvements in health and wellbeing.

Reliable improvement refers to individuals whose scores have improved by a statistically reliable amount, irrespective of whether they meet recovery criteria. Reliable improvement therefore covers both people who have recovered and those people whose improvement is significant, but falls short of full recovery.

When the data is shown:

This indicator is not scored, as many factors such as casemix can affect a service's recovery rate.  The term casemix is applied to reflect the complexity (mix) of the care provided to a patient.

Numerator: number of people with reliable improvementDenominator: number of people completing a course of treatment

More information about the data source:

In some cases, a service will be reported as "N/A" on this indicator. This could mean that no data is currently available, or it could be due to low numbers which have been supressed in these data. The Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) supresses numbers lower than 5, in order to preserve service-user anonymity. Therefore, if a service has less than 5 cases recorded for any measure used to calculate this indicator, the overall score cannot be computed, and will be recorded as "N/A". For example, as part of the calculation for the recovery rate involves knowing the number of people who were not at caseness at the start of treatment. Therefore, if a particular service has low numbers of people not at caseness (perhaps due to the area having a higher number of more severe cases), a recovery rate cannot be reported.

Data Source:

Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) Dataset - NHS Digital

Data Period:

Monthly: April 2019

Data Supplier:

Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) Dataset - Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC)

Further Information:

These data are published monthly.  For further information please refer to the monthly Improving Access to Psychological Therapies  (IAPT) reports on the HSCIC website at  http://www.hscic.gov.uk/mentalhealth