A campaign to improve access to therapy on the NHS

This week I received an email from the charity Rethink about their new campaign to improve access to talking therapy on the NHS when people need it. I think it will be of interest to many people here.

The key demand of the campaign is that the maximum waiting time from referral to first treatment should be 28 days and when someone presents with a mental health emergency, the wait should be even shorter. These commitments should be enshrined as a right for patients in the NHS Constitution. Also that people should have a say in the type of therapy they receive, appointment times and locations. If you're interested in knowing more there is a report here [PDF format].

To sign up to the campaign please visit this page and fill in your name and address. This allows you to send a letter to the chief executive of the NHS. There is a pro-forma letter but you can also add a personal comment if you wish.

If you're interested, this is what I wrote in my letter:

Quote:

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Dear Mr. Nicholson,

We Need To Talk

Today the We Need to Talk coalition published a report which tells us that a third of people with the most severe mental illness are not offered talking therapy by the NHS. Yet evidence shows that when people are able to access psychological therapies, it improves their health and helps make recovery possible - it can also help prevent people from developing psychosis in the first place. One in five people with severe mental illness are waiting more than a year to get psychological therapies. We would never accept this state of affairs for people with physical health problems and it should be no different for people with mental illness.

I know that the NHS has committed to waiting time standards but this report shows that demand for therapy is growing while many of us are still waiting far too long to get help. Without immediate action I am worried that the Government is at risk of failing to meet its legal duty to make sure that physical and mental health are equally valued by the NHS.

It is crucial that people can have access to therapy when they need it.

I personally have found it difficult to access therapy on the NHS when I needed it. I was referred to a 6-week Stress Control course, which was very helpful, but as it was a group course I didn't receive any 1 to 1 help related to my personal issues. When I asked for this, I was told that it was only available Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm, which clashes with my working hours (as I suspect it does for the vast majority of the adult working population). It seems that most of the local NHS wellbeing services are aimed at people who are too sick to work.

In the end I had to seek 1 to 1 online therapy from a voluntary organisation, which fits in with my lifestyle. If this help had not been available, I would not have received any personalised therapy at all.

I believe everyone should be able to access personalised therapy free of charge on the NHS. It is far better to help people when they are still able to work rather than waiting until their condition deteriorates so that they're too sick to work.

Mental and physical health should be treated with equal importance. Everyone, regardless of whether they’ve got asthma or bipolar disorder should be entitled to the same quality of care and treatment.

The We Need To Talk coalition is asking you to offer access to talking therapies to everyone who needs them within 28 days of requesting a referral. I agree with this and am writing to ask you to please make this an urgent priority for the NHS.

Will you please help people with severe mental illness get the help they so urgently need?
Yours sincerely,

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I got an email and letter too :)

I had to wait 10 months for CBT when I was scored severely depressed and anxious, which still disgusts me to this day. I can get an x-ray in one day (or one hour) and yet if I need therapy I have to wait the best part of a year! I could go on.....

For me the wait is an issue but what is more of an issue is the quality of service at the end of that wait.

In a lot of areas "IAPT" (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) is pretty much all people can get referred. In my area I've been through IAPT service a couple of times and they are not geared up to deal with long standing, deep rooted issues. They do short term CBT based treatments or maybe very short counselling for specific issues like grief. They effectively take people who have been generally mentally well and then help them when they have a small bump in the road, ignoring those with more deep rooted and/or severe problems.

I think what is needed is wide access to higher quality services......... instead of this short term quick fix approach.

The problem is mental health isn't glamorous. While the health service has to cut bugets there will always be a push to ring-fence headline grabbing issues like cancer or child services.......... but no one really cares if the MH budget gets frozen or cut.

Many people have to make do with whatever limited support the GP can offer (i.e. medications) or very short bursts of therapy after a very long wait. In what other area of medicine would someone be time limited to treatment - can you imagine - "Sorry sir, if your cancer isn't cured in 8 1 hour sessions then bad luck, we have to discharge you back to your GP".

Hi all this is my first post

Just wondering if anyone else here has found their GP not very approachable in regards to anxiety? I have had these feelings since i was young but in march my partner was in hospital waiting to give birth and i started to get pains in my chest and find it hard to breathe being a smoker made this worse, the bad thoughts and all , pretty sure a lot of you know the drill. So i went to my GP on a emergency appointment and was told i was fine medically sounds like just a bit of Anxiety. That was it. No not knowing much about this condition i was a little peeved that was the only answer given, because even though i was not physically in any danger it took a huge strain on my mental health. but i have been twice since and one GP said i will you book you in for a chest xray if it will put you mind at ease, but i didn't want that i wanted to know more about anxiety as i had little knowledge , but to this day i still can't get a decent answer from any GP at my clinic and was just curious to see if others felt the same?