Improving Access to Evidenced Based Psychological Treatments for Children & Adolescents in the UK

Beginning in 2002, the Department of Health (DoH) n partnership with the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) began publishing
guidelines for the evidenced-based care and treatment of individuals with specific psychiatric disorders. With few exceptions the first-line
psychological treatment recommended in all of the guidelines was some form of CBT. The publications of these guidelines led to a reassessment
of the CBT capacity needed to provide this recommended treatment. Out of this assessment was born the Improving Access to
Psychological Therapies programme (IAPT) - which aimed to train 10,000 new CBT therapists to provide low and high intensity CBT to
adults with anxiety and depression. Building on the success of this programme, the DoH has decided to extend the IAPT so that children
with anxiety, depression and behaviour disorders might also gain improved access to CBT. This presentation details the training curriculum
(core skills and disorder-based training, supervision and assessment requirements) and the service modernization changes (improving
care pathways, weekly outcome measurement, building local CBT supervision capacity and stakeholder involvement) imposed on clinical
services that send staff for IAPT training. Drawing on his experience of CBT dissemination in the UK and Europe, the presenter discusses
the issues that this new iteration of IAPT will need to address (low CBT supervision capacity, problems of staff retention after training,
competition between professional groups, and cultural resistance to assigning diagnoses to and repeated assessment of children) if it is to
be as successful as its adult counterpart.