Psychological therapies waiting times
Quarter ending June 2022

About this release

This release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) provides an update on how long people waited to start treatment with psychological therapies provided by NHS Scotland for the quarter ending June 2022. An update of referrals data from the experimental Child, Adolescent, and Psychological Therapies National Dataset (CAPTND) has been published alongside this publication.

Main points

For the quarter ending June 2022:

• 19,368 people started psychological therapies treatment in NHS Boards and NHS 24 in the quarter ending June 2022. This is a decrease of 3.0% (609) from the previous quarter and a decrease of 2.7% (542) from June 2021.
• 81.4% of people started their treatment within 18 weeks of referral, compared to 83.1% of people for the previous quarter, and 82.9% of people for the quarter ending June 2021. The Scottish Government standard states that 90% of people should start their treatment within 18 weeks of referral to psychological therapies. Half of the people starting treatment started within 2 weeks of referral.

Percentage of patients who started psychological therapy treatment within 18 weeks of referral, quarterly March 2017 - June 2022, NHS Scotland

Figure 1: Shows the quarterly trend of the percentage of patients who started psychological therapies treatment within 18 weeks. it covers the period from March 2017 to June 2022.

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• 1,184 people aged 65+ years started treatment with psychological therapies in this quarter. 82.5% started their treatment within 18 weeks of referral, a decrease from both 85.3% in the previous quarter and 86.3% for the quarter ending June 2021.
• Changes in working practices, including staff being re-deployed and the provision of on-line appointments (which not all patients wished to take up) during the pandemic led to fewer people starting treatment during this time. Activity has now increased to pre-COVID-19 levels.
• The number of referrals are now similar to pre-COVID-19 levels, with 39,280 people being referred for psychological therapies (and in some cases further adult mental health services) in Scotland (see the Data Quality Document). This is a 2.6% (1,051) decrease from the 40,331 people referred in the previous quarter and a 6.1% (2,558) decrease from the same quarter ending June 2021 (41,838 referrals).

Background

Waiting times information for psychological therapies is still being developed. NHS Boards are working with PHS and the Scottish Government to improve the consistency and completeness of the information.

Psychological therapies refer to a range of interventions, based on psychological concepts and theory, which are designed to help people understand and make changes to their thinking, behaviour and relationships in order to relieve distress and to improve functioning. The standard applies specifically to psychological therapies for treatment of a mental illness or disorder.

Further information

The next release of this publication will be 06 December 2022.