Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of people with blood cancer that will be referred into the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies integrated pathway as a result of the NHS Digital pilot data, published on 10 May 2018.

NHS England has not specified estimates of individual conditions for referral into the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) integrated pathway. Local commissioning groups decide which pathways they integrate with based on their local prevalence and local intelligence data.

Similarly, the NHS Digital IAPT dataset does not collect information on patients with a diagnosis of cancer, or types of cancer.

There are currently no national plans to assess the effectiveness of the IAPT long-term health conditions pathway on people affected specifically by blood cancer. However there is robust evidence that by using the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence approved psychological therapies in addressing the mental health issues of those people with long term conditions earlier, talking therapies help to improve patients’ health outcomes so that they become less reliant on primary and emergency care and importantly, help patients to self-manage their long-term conditions more confidently.