Routine Monthly Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Data Quality Reports - England, final December 2012 and provisional January 2013

The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) dataset is a regular return of data generated by providers of NHS-commissioned IAPT services in England (including services provided by independent organisations). It was mandated as a monthly return from 1 April 2012 and collects details of all people accessing these services. Submissions are received by the Health and Social Care Information Centre as record level anonymised data from patient administration systems.

This publication comprises national and provider level data quality measures of some key data items in the IAPT dataset: postcode; birthdate; gender; ethnicity; general medical practice code; NHS number; religious belief; sexual orientation; presence of a long term physical health condition; provisional diagnosis; source of referral; Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ 9) score; Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) score; Work and Social Adjustment Scale score; appointment type; therapy type; disability. These measures are provided as both counts and percentages of all eligible IAPT records and will be of interest to stakeholders (e.g. the Department of Health and service commissioners), data providers and users of our statistics (e.g. mental health organisations including charities, and service users and their representatives).

• read more about the IAPT dataset
• the Information Standards Notice for the IAPT dataset can be found on the Information Standards Board website.

We are currently in discussions with the Department of Health about amendments to the constructions of the following data quality measures:

DQM26  Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ 9) Score;
DQM27  Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD 7) Score;
DQM28  Work and Social Adjustment Scale Score;
DQM29  Appointment Type;
DQM30 Therapy type.

General notes

The Health and Social Care Information Centre does not presently have permission to hold person identifiable data. It is therefore only been possible to validate person identifiable data items such as NHS number, Postcode and Date of Birth by using data items which have been derived from these items (as specified in the validation rules).