Waiting list support for mental health patients
Research type
Research Study
Full title
A randomised controlled trial to measure the impact of operational transparency text messages during waiting periods on attendance and engagement with treatment among Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) patients.
IRAS ID
241177
Contact name
Michael Hallsworth
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Behavioural Insights Tesam
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 0 days
Research summary
Background:
Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services provide treatment to people with anxiety and depression. The IAPT programme began in 2008 and has successfully increased access to psychological therapy for many people, but there is room for improvement in the service. Of the 1.4 million people referred to the service in 2015/16, almost two in three people did not complete a course of treatment. This imposes a cost on the services and increases waiting times for others.
Aims:
This project will test whether sending a series of text messages to patients awaiting IAPT treatment can reduce unscheduled dropout. We will measure whether patients who received the text messages while waiting were more likely to attend two or more IAPT appointments than those who did not. We will also look at unscheduled dropout, completion of treatment and health outcomes (depression and anxiety) as secondary outcome measures.
Trial details:
Participants will be patients referred to of one of the seven participating IAPT services during the recruitment stage of the trial period. All IAPT patients are adults. Patients will only be eligible to receive the new messages if they have already explicitly consented to receive text messages from their IAPT service. Patients will be allocated at random to either receive the series of text messages (the intervention), or to continue to receive standard communication from services (business as usual).
Risks:
The primary risk is that the new messages have the opposite effect and increase unscheduled dropout from the waiting lists. The messages have been specifically worded to minimise this risk.
Locations and timeline:
The trial will be run at seven participating NHS IAPT providers across England for 6 months from Spring 2018.
REC name
Yorkshire & The Humber - Bradford Leeds Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/YH/0105
Date of REC Opinion
28 Mar 2018
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion