Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT): the impact of service changes due to COVID-19 on people with learning disabilities

Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT): the impact of service changes due to COVID-19 on people with learning disabilities Caroline Rodhouse, Dave Dagnan, Richard Thwaites, Chris Hatton Advances in Mental Health and Intellectual Disabilities, Vol. ahead-of-print, No. ahead-of-print, pp.- Primary care psychological interventions for people with common mental health problems in England are primarily delivered through Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services. People with learning disabilities within IAPT have poorer key clinical outcomes than people who do not identify as having a learning disability. During the global COVID-19 pandemic remote consultations have accounted for nearly 90% of all contacts in IAPT services; this paper aims to report the effects of these on outcomes for people with learning disabilities. Publicly available national data from the COVID-affected period are compared to the most recent available comparison periods that are not during the COVID pandemic. Data are presented graphically. People with learning disabilities differ little from those with no disabilities on several key process and outcome variables, although their clinical recovery is very much lower than those without disabilities. People with learning disabilities appear to have been affected by the changes in service delivery in a similar way to those without learning disabilities. Despite the shift to predominantly rem...
Source: Advances in Mental Health and Intellectual Disabilities - Category: Disability Authors: Source Type: research