Providing mental healthcare in partnership with the private and voluntary sector

" when most of our CBT therapists were still untrained"

This is a huge risk. Poorly trained people risk being very unhelpful in the long run. The current vogue of seeing CBT as the cure for everything is another matter.

The CBT therapists were recieving training in formal delivery of CBT; they were already very experienced in primary care mental health and in other psychological treatments. So the introduction of IAPT was relatively seamless, except for logistical and organisational developments. The risks of being unhelpful were greatly reduced.

One of the advantages of DH insisting on more CBT trained therapists, has meant that there are many therapists out there now who are trained in more than one psychotherapy model, and offer increasing expertise as well as choice.

As the latest DH IAPT report states "Services that had a higher proportion of experienced therapists had higher overall recovery rates".