Since September 2018, the London Digital IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) team has been working on several projects to improve service users' digital access to IAPT/Talking therapies. The Covid-19 crisis has been a difficult period for Londoners and has led to a rise in mental health needs for the population.

We have been developing a new digital process to enable quicker, safe, and secure access to IAPT services. Over the past two years, we have worked on a IAPT e-triage process with clinicians and experts by experience to review existing digital pathways into London IAPT services.

Through this work we have co-designed a new digital triage process which will provide a consistent and easy access into IAPT services, and we are currently testing the process at Barking and Dagenham. The test involves the full use of the new e-triage forms for 6 months. During this period, we will ask the users of the forms to share their experiences with us. We want to know if the process was easy to complete for service users; we also want to measure the impact of the new process on the IAPT workforce.

The e-triage process will go live in November 2021. An evaluation report will be available in June 2022. Details on the programme can be found on the HLP website here.

If you are interested to know more about this project, please email hlp.digitaliaptldn@nhs.net