The target to see people who have been referred for psychological therapies within 18 weeks is important. As you said, currently only 81 per cent of people are being seen within that timescale, and that position has been broadly static for a while. Five health boards currently meet the target.
Members will not be surprised to hear that SAMH supports the call for an independent inquiry into why current targets have not been met, given that we made that call, but beyond that there is much that we could learn if we looked a little more into the statistics, which come out regularly. For example, we know that NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Ayrshire and Arran deal with notably more referrals per head of population than other health boards. Glasgow is one of the boards that is meeting the waiting time target. We would like to know why it is able to do that, given that it deals with more referrals per head of population.
We would like to know more about what therapies are being provided. A couple of years ago, we made some freedom of information requests and found that the majority of health boards could not tell us much about equalities data, for example, so we do not know whether different groups are getting more or less access to psychological therapies. We question why health boards are not collecting that data or aggregating it in a way that enables them to review what is going on. Boards were not collecting, at aggregate level, details of the therapies that were being provided, so they could not tell us what they were providing. Of course, that is recorded at the individual level but, if it is not reviewed at board level, we question how boards know what they need to plan for.
There is a lot more that we would like to understand about the good practice that is going on and about what we can learn. There is good practice in England, where the improving access to psychological therapies programme seems to be getting good results, with 61 per cent of people being seen within 28 days. There has been investment in 3,000 new therapists, so quite a lot of funding is going into the initiative. There is a lot that we could look at to see what we can learn.
The vision document talks about rolling out computerised cognitive behavioural therapy for people to help to meet the target. There is an evidence base for computerised CBT, and it can work for many people, but other approaches have an equivalent evidence base, such as one-to-one CBT and behavioural activation. In the interests of choice, we would like approaches that have just as strong an evidence base to be rolled out, too.
A lot of people are waiting for services. At the end of the last quarter, I think that 18,000 people were waiting to start treatment. There is a lot that we need to learn. We would like the target to come down to 12 weeks, to bring it more into line with other health service targets. We are not sure why the target in mental health should be higher.
You asked whether we support the target continuing. We are doing a bit of policy work internally to inform our position on the national review into targets and indicators for health and social care, on which the committee recently took evidence. We have not reached a final position on that. We are wary of losing mental health targets, because targets drive investment and improvement, but we accept that we might be able to do something better if we took a wider approach, particularly on the psychological therapies target. We know a great deal about how long people wait and the points on their journey, but we do not really know whether people felt better at the end of their treatment and what helped or did not help them. We think that the target could be improved, but we hope that we do not move away from it entirely without giving it careful thought.