Reading celebrates training mental health practitioners for 10 years
03 November 2018
People with depression and anxiety across the country have benefited from more than 1000 therapy workers who have been trained at the University of Reading over the past 10 years.
The Charlie Waller Institute, which first began training therapist on 3 November 2008, is now celebrating 10 years of providing a programme set up by the Government to improve patient access to psychological therapies called Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT).
Professor Shirley Reynolds, Director of the Charlie Waller Institute at the University of Reading said:
“The Charlie Waller Institute was opened in 2008 to help increase the evidence based treatment for people with mental ill health. We’re proud to have contributed our expertise and experience for the past 10 years. We are most proud of the countless number of people who have benefitted from the treatments our trainees have provided.”
As well as providing training for the adults as part of the NHS IAPT programme, the Charlie Waller Institute was also appointed as a training provider for a Children and Young People’s IAPT in 2011. This means that the Institute now also trains clinicians in the specific evidence based skills needed to assess and treat young people who have mental health problems.
In the ten years that the IAPT programme has run nationally, more than 8000 therapists have been trained. Every year around 560,000 patients have received a course of treatment, with recovery rates improving from 43% in 2008 to more than 50% in 2017, and nationally 2/3rd of people (66.6%) who receive treatment report that they have significantly improved.
Local therapists, trained at the Charlie Waller Institute have gone on to provide mental health support in the Windsor, Ascot and Maidenhead, and Slough areas which have seen large improvements in the number of people who receive treatment and in the numbers who recover. For example in the Slough area, one of the most deprived parts of the country, in 2018 recovery rates rose to 58.2% and 72% of people reported improvement.
Alongside the formal training programmes offered by the Charlie Waller Institute many 1000s of NHS clinicians have attended specialist workshops that are delivered by international leading academics in the field.
Further details about the Charlie Waller Institute are available at:
https://www.reading.ac.uk/charliewaller/cwi-home.aspx