----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, June 23, 2006 11:34
AM
Subject: 10000 more psychologists
needed....
This in today's British Medical Journal.
There's an opportunity to respond to this in their 'rapid responses' email
service if people are interested (you can reply via this link http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/332/7556/1471-a)
News roundup
UK needs 10 000 extra psychologists
London
Robert Short
An additional 10 000 new clinical psychologists and
psychological therapists need to be trained to enable depression, anxiety, and
schizophrenia in the United Kingdom to be treated according to the standards
of national evidence based guidelines by 2013.
Currently, only one
person in four in the UK with depression or chronic anxiety receives
treatment. Treatment is mostly limited to prescriptions from GPs, but many
would prefer the “talking therapies” advocated in the National Institute for
Health and Clinical Excellence’s guidance on mental health.
In a
report, the mental health policy group of the UK’s Centre for Economic
Performance has proposed a seven year plan to establish 250 local
psychological services, which will each include an average of 40 therapists,
to meet the UK’s shortfall in psychological treatment. To stagger costs, about
40 services might be set up each year in the next seven years.
By 2013
the gross cost of the service would be about £600m (€880m; $1.1bn) a year and
annual training costs about £50m. The authors argue that the proposed service
would pay for itself because of reduced spending on incapacity benefit. One
course of cognitive behaviour therapy costs £750 and results in about a year
of extra free of depression, almost two months of extra time in work, and
almost two months less on incapacity benefit (one month of which costs £750 if
the fall in tax receipts and benefit payments are both taken into account).
Most treatment would take place in GP surgeries, job centres,
workplaces, or premises provided by voluntary organisations. The Royal College
of General Practitioners has expressed support for the idea of a centrally led
effort to establish the new service.
The chief executives of the
mental health charities Mind, Rethink, the Mental Health Foundation, and the
Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health are united in broad support for the
increased availability of “talking therapies” on the NHS and reduction in
waiting times. “Access to evidence based talking therapies for those who need
them should be as big a priority for the NHS as any other proven and cost
effective treatment,” they said in a joint statement.
But Andrew
McCulloch, the chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation, warned that
the report oversells cognitive behaviour therapy to the government and public.
“There is a real risk that the government will think that a few sessions of
cognitive behaviour therapy in isolation will help people with depression to
recover, when it often will not. We need a range of treatments to be made
available for people living with depression, especially those whose symptoms
are severe.”
The Depression Report: a New Deal for Depression and
Anxiety Disorders is available at http://cep.lse.ac.uk.
Petra M Boynton,
PhD
Lecturer in Health Services Research
Department Primary Care and
Population Sciences, UCL.
Open Learning Unit, Archway Campus
4th Floor,
Holborn Union Building, Highgate Hill
London, N19 5LW.
Tel: 0207 288
3325 Mob: 07967
212925
The Research Companion Messageboard - share your experiences and
get support here! www.psypress.co.uk/boynton
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