The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme aims to relieve distress and transform lives by offering NICE-approved interventions and treatment choice to people with depression and anxiety disorders, and by improving the collection, recording and measurement of patients' health outcomes, producing the evidence to support the completion of the national roll-out of services.

The North East has already made excellent progress in beginning the roll-out of IAPT services over the past two years. Moving into 2010-11, six services, within two-thirds of the region's Primary Care Trusts, have been established, and a further four Primary Care Trusts will select providers to deliver IAPT services to the remainder of the regional population by the end of 2010.

Our activities to deliver the final year of roll-out of the IAPT programme are to:

• Develop new IAPT services across all Primary Care Trusts in the North East.
• Develop a workforce capable of delivering NICE-compliant psychological therapies.

Our target is that 100% of the population of the North East will be able to access psychological therapies within primary care services.  For the North East, this will mean:

• A prevalence rate for people experiencing anxiety and depression of 330,393
• 49,559 people accessing psychological therapy services
• 29,735 people entering psychological therapy services
• 14,868 people moving to recovery
• 1,400 people moving from sick pay or benefits back into employment.

The regional IAPT lead is Liam Gilfellon