This post opens a new series summarising publicly available mental health data resources, beginning with NHS Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression (NHS TT). The series aims to help researchers, analysts, and clinicians navigate existing data sources, understand their structure and limitations, and use them effectively to inform and conduct research projects.
The NHS Talking Therapies programme
In 2008, England began the roll out of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme which established psychological therapy services that would deliver evidence-based treatments for common mental health disorders (CMHDs), such as anxiety disorders and depression. The services, recently renamed NHS Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression (NHS TT), operate in all areas of England and are based on a public promise that patients will:
- Receive the relevant NICE recommended psychological therapies for their presenting problem
- Have treatment delivered by clinicians who are specially trained in those therapies
- Have the outcomes of everyone who receives treatment recorded with aggregate reports made available to the public
From a small beginning in the first year the NHS Talking Therapies services have grown to a point where over 670,000 patients receive a course of treatment each year. National reporting shows that services are currently collecting pre-post outcome measures for 98% of patients receiving treatment, which is achieved in part through the use of session-by-session routine outcome measurement throughout therapy to track treatment progress. The national dataset, which now comprises around 8 million treated patients, also includes detailed information on patient demographics, some physical health information, types and dose of treatment, wait times, employment, and more. Importantly each service collects the same standardised minimum dataset (MDS).
OpenSAFELY Talking Therapies: A step change for psychotherapy research
The individual-level patient records within this national dataset represent an extraordinary resource for research, particularly when linked with other NHS datasets such as primary care data to answer questions about treatment effectiveness, long-term outcomes, and the broader impacts of psychological therapies on both mental and physical health. As part of the Wellcome funded OpenSAFELY Talking Therapies project, we will integrate individual level NHS TT data into OpenSAFELY, enabling privacy-preserving linkage across multiple datasets while providing secure access for researchers. This integration will transform how researchers can work with NHS TT data. Automatic and reliable data linkage in near real-time will turbo-charge psychological therapy research and make it possible to answer questions that have been difficult or impossible to address until now.
Here are some examples: We will be able to rapidly evaluate new digital therapeutics and treatments by comparing outcomes at population scale with appropriate control groups. The linkage of full EHR records for all NHS TT patients (approximately 8 million treated patients and growing) will also enable much more comprehensive research on “what works for whom?”, with access to detailed medical information before, during, and after accessing Talking Therapies, including physical health conditions and complete medication history. Building on the success of our OpenSAFELY Co-Pilot programme, we will launch a programme to provide intensive ongoing support for mental health researchers with deep domain knowledge around psychological therapies but minimal experience with research using electronic health records.
Beyond the individual-level linked data that will be available as part of the OpenSAFELY Talking Therapies project, NHS England already publishes detailed aggregated NHS Talking Therapies data that is freely and openly available to everyone.
Publicly available NHS TT data
NHS England already publishes extensive NHS Talking Therapies data freely and openly, accessible to researchers, analysts, clinicians, and the public. These aggregated publications are published at three different reporting frequencies (yearly, quarterly, and monthly), allowing anyone to analyse patterns in one of the largest psychological therapy programmes globally.
Each publication serves distinct purposes and offers different levels of detail. Alongside the raw data files, each publication is accompanied with an interactive dashboard summarising some, but not all, of the publicly available data. All measures are described in detail in the NHS Talking Therapies Metadata file (available for download here). Table 1 gives an overview and brief comparison of the different data publications and dashboards.
| Description of raw data | Content in dashboards | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | Timely, high-level statistics used by NHS England to monitor key performance indicators including access, waiting times, and outcomes such as “recovery”. Some patients may appear in more than one reporting period. The raw data is well structured, with unique identifiers, separated into 3 groups (205 core measures, 110 employment advisor measures, 12 long-term condition measures as of September 2025). | The monthly dashboard presents referral activity, waiting times, treatment completions, and outcomes, with visualisations of changes in these measures over the previous 12 months. |
| Quarterly | Aggregated data covering a three-month period, providing a more stable view of activity and outcomes than the monthly data. Not all monthly measures are included in the quarterly reports. Quarterly reports are broken down in more detail (e.g., ethnic groups, religion) compared to monthly reports, similar to the breakdowns in the annual data. | The quarterly dashboard the selected measures, including demographic, clinical and regional breakdowns, with the ability to compare providers, regions, and Integrated Care Boards (ICBs). |
| Annual | The annual reports consist of processed and validated episode-level data from the monthly reports, covering a full NHS financial year. They include detailed analyses by service, clinical condition, and demographic as well as regional breakdowns. The data structure is different from the monthly and quarterly datasets. | Two main annual dashboards are available: (1) the Annual Interactive Dashboard and (2) the Therapy-Based Outcomes Dashboard, each providing measures for one annual period. |
Annual publications provide the most comprehensive and reliable view of NHS TT activity and outcomes. These reports are extensively validated and cleaned to remove duplicates and ensure data accuracy. Each release includes complete activity data from referral through discharge, with detailed analyses of outcomes and service delivery.
Quarterly and monthly publications support operational monitoring and management. They include statistics on the number of referrals, waiting times against six- and eighteen-week standards, treatment starts and completions, recovery rates, and employment support activity. These publications benefit from the ability to understand immediate service usage metrics, but have not been processed and validated to the extent of the annual reports.
Data access and format
All publicly available data can be accessed through NHS Digital’s website as Excel and CSV files. While comprehensive, these data files come in multiple separate tables that require some data management before they can be interpreted carefully.
However, researchers should be aware that not all fields in the public datasets are equally reliable or suitable for research purposes. For example, the patient experience questionnaire data, while potentially valuable, has very low completion rates (around 10% compared to 98% for clinical outcomes), limiting its usefulness for research. Similarly, some fields like appointment duration may contain default values rather than actual recorded times, requiring careful validation before use.
Variable names have also changed over time as the programme has evolved, adding another layer of complexity for researchers attempting longitudinal analyses. We are working on making the data more accessible to interested parties in a structured way, including developing tools that give researchers easy data access to the publicly available NHS TT reports.
What comes next
This series will explore publicly available mental health data in more detail. Future posts will include explanations of NHS TT outcome metrics, as well as guidance on working with NHS TT data. We will also write about other national mental health data resources including the Mental Health of Children and Young People surveys, the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Surveys, and the Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS).