Therapy For You is an Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service offering therapy to adults presenting with mild to moderate and moderate to severe anxiety and/or depression within primary care.
Therapy For You is an Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service offering therapy to adults presenting with mild to moderate and moderate to severe anxiety and/or depression within primary care.
An innovative mobile application has been developed and went live in November 2015 to enable treatment options to be accessed online 24/7 and which demonstrates the Trust’s commitment to inclusion. This will enable the service to reach various client groups who do not traditionally tend to access mental health services, client groups such as carers or shift workers who find it hard to attend regular appointments and client groups concerned about stigma attached to being seen to access therapy services. For the service, there are cost efficiencies to be had by the reduced need for face to face appointments and the costs associated with this.
The service can be used as a stand-alone intervention or in conjunction with individual therapy to enhance the patient experience. There is no wait for the service once registered and this immediate access to support and treatment pathways contributes to patient safety by avoiding the possibility of deterioration over time and to improved patient outcomes.
The mobile/online treatments are accessed via our website www.therapyforyou.co.uk and it can also be used to support face-to-face therapy; offering opportunities to consolidate learning, using cognitive behavioural tools and techniques. An introduction animation is available on the home page which describes the service and treatment pathways available. This is further supported by our ‘Route To Treatment’ tab which describes treatment interventions and how they can be used.
Our ‘How do You Feel?’ tab describes different clinical presentations such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Adjusting to Later Life and Low Mood After Childbirth, to name but a few.
Our ‘Courses’ tab enables visitors to the site to sample our online courses which are a mirror of our face-to-face courses. This tab allows visitors to access online courses or book face-to-face courses such as our popular Stress and Mood Management psycho- educational course.
Please cut and paste the links into your browser to see how this works with our self- esteem course:
https://www.therapyforyou.co.uk/courses/group/view/16
In addition to this service being available to patients, the Trust’s staff also have access to the mobile online treatment pathways as well as our live face to face courses. This offers support for staff well-being and also enhances their own skills and knowledge to impart to their patient base where appropriate, improving staff’s overall experience.
We have been working with community services and organisations to discuss how we can engage with their client groups to encourage wider access. We are currently working with peri natal groups, long term conditions services and Medication Adherence Programme (MAP) for example. We also link with 3rd sector organisations, such as local hospices, to increase awareness of our service’s treatment options that their clients can also access.
We are always looking for service user Champions and in this project we recruited several volunteers who had attended the live face to face Stress and Mood Management Course to test out the mobile/online versions and give feedback. This enabled us to refine both the content and process of this treatment pathway.
Additionally we have service users who have volunteered to speak of their personal experience of our service at community engagement events and below is an example of two such people who agreed to be recorded giving feedback.
Please copy and paste into your internet browser to view this: https://www.therapyforyou.co.uk/courses/online/view/2
Staff are encouraged to give feedback either directly via team meetings or anonymously if preferred through our ‘You said… We did……’ feedback system.
We would have made it easier for the service user to access the sessions in shorter cycles, for example by dividing an hour session into two 30 minute parts. It is possible to do this by using a ‘pause’ facility currently but we now realise it would be more user friendly to offer the treatments in shorter part sessions and this is currently under consideration in Phase 2 of the development of this service.
As therapists the biggest challenge was understanding the technology and steps needed to build the mobile application as this was essential to be sure that all areas were included such as minimum data sets, therapy options and pathways, and information governance. This involved setting up project groups and task and finish groups and being involved at every point in the development of this service.
Two staff have been identified as ‘super users’ and have been included in service development meetings throughout the project. Their development in this role has allowed them to develop their confidence and leadership qualities, helping with FAQ from both service users and from colleagues.
In the first instance before the service went live, we recruited service users who have attended and benefited from our live face to face courses to test drive the mobile applications. Currently we use performance data reports (shared with commissioners) that gives us referral rates and before/after outcome measures enabling us to monitor the difference made to our entering treatment rates and also to the recovery rates.
We are currently considering using an electronic survey to invite feedback from service users on their experience, including suggestions for improvement, and this can be submitted anonymously.
In the interest of sharing good practice, skills and knowledge, we have demonstrated our mobile therapy options to other NHS Trusts and have been invited to attend again to discuss in more detail with their IT department to see how this can be used to benefit their patients.
To support the narrative about our Therapy For You service, please see below statistics detailing the actual take up of the service.
Between 1 November 2015 to 19 May 2016 the following statistics:
36,342 Sessions (unique visits)
22,226 Users (unique)
132,176 Page views
3.64 Average pages per session 03:22 Average session duration 50.27% Bounce rate
61.26 New sessions
Traffic Sources
46.97% Organic
22.30% Direct
20.48% Echo (local media adverts) 8.93% Referral (43.93% SEPT.nhs.uk) 1.33% Social media
