Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Health – in the House of Commons at 11:30 am on 27 November 2012.
Norman Lamb
The Minister of State, Department of Health
11:30,
27 November 2012
I acknowledge the hon. Gentleman’s work on promoting the case for psychological therapies, including mindfulness, and would be happy to meet him and a delegation of experts. The Government have massively increased psychological therapies—nearly 1 million people in the past two years accessed psychological therapies through the improving access to psychological therapies programme. We are totally committed to improving access to psychological therapies to cure the imbalance in access to services for people with mental health problems that has existed for a very long time.
Annotations
Karen Elliott
Posted on 28 Nov 2012 5:50 pm (Report this annotation)
Although I think it is excellent that there has been such a huge focus on the IAPT initiative as a Speech & Language Therapist I am concerned about the large numbers of people with mental health problems and coexisting communication problems who find these verbally mediated approaches difficult to access (this is not just those with a Learning Disability or Difficulty). Verbal problem solving difficulties have often contributed and/or exacerbated their mental health problems and I think we need to look at how we make sure these individuals can effectively access these therapies if they are to be cost effective.