Recovery and improvement benchmarks for counselling and the psychological therapies in routine primary care

Abstract

Measuring the outcomes of counselling and the psychological therapies has become an increasingly important component in managing individual services within routine primary care settings. Outcome data collected from multiple settings can be combined to establish benchmarks against which services and practitioners can make comparisons. To achieve this, we used a large data set comprising >11,000 clients from 32 primary care NHS services who completed the CORE-OM at both intake and end of counselling or therapy. We used four categories relating to components of reliable and clinically significant change (recovery, improvement, no reliable change, and reliable deterioration) to establish service benchmarks. However, we focussed primarily on those relating to recovery and improvement. Importantly, in addition to service benchmarks, we calculated benchmarks for individual practitioners taking into account a simple adjustment for case mix. The resulting benchmarks and their meaning are discussed.

Keywords:

• CORE-OM
• benchmarks
• reliable and clinically significant change
• recovery
• improvement
• psychological therapies
• primary care

This work was supported by funding from the Artemis Trust and also from the Research & Development Priorities & Needs Levy via Leeds Mental Health and Teaching NHS Trust. We would like to thank Richard Evans and members of Psychological Therapies Research Network North (PsyReNN) for their helpful comments an earlier draft. We also thank Alex Curtis-Jenkins at CORE IMS for his technical input into the data collection process.