Dr. David Clark, a British expert in making evidence-based psychotherapy available nationwide, visited The Royal as the first stop on his three-day Canadian visit to advise and inform the implementation of the Increasing Access to Structured Psychotherapy program in Ontario.
Clark is a clinical psychologist and professor at Oxford University. Together with health economist Lord Richard Layard, he designed the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) program in England.
IAPT makes evidence-based psychological treatments for depression and anxiety disorders available in every community in England. It has done this by training a large number of psychotherapists, deploying them in specialized local services, and measuring and reporting clinical outcomes for all patients who receive a course of treatment.
In order to convince the British government to fund IAPT, Clark and Layard presented the economic case for making psychotherapy widely available: access to psychotherapy, they said, would cost the government nothing. In fact, it would offer a return on investment.
At The Royal, Clark presented how this claim has turned out to be true, and how IAPT works (and continually improves). During his Feb. 5 visit, he presented his work at a special Grand Rounds and participated alongside clinical leaders from The Royal in a roundtable with provincial and national agencies on the benefits and challenges of making evidence based psychological therapies widely available.
“Mental illness is 38 per cent of all illness in rich countries, and emotional health is by far the main influence on people’s life satisfaction,” he said. It is also linked to physical comorbidity — people with mental illness are significantly more likely to have physical health problems than those without mental illness.
In simple terms, Clark and Layard compared the cost of treatment to the savings on physical health care, as well as the savings on benefits/taxes, and showed that the savings of treating someone is at least double the cost of treating them.
“That was our message to the government: ‘If you do this, it will cost you nothing, but will improve the lives of many people,” Clark said.
He shared the things that have made IAPT successful, including its reliance on excellent data and tracking patient outcomes for improvement and accountability, to help inform leaders at The Royal as we work alongside our partners to implement the Increasing Access to Structured Psychotherapy program across Ontario.
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Dr. David Clark met with clinical leaders in psychotherapy at The Royal to share his experience making evidence based psychological therapies widely available.