https://tinyurl.com/y8c9enzf
Maybe the following have rankled Prof Sharpe and perhaps embody another good reason why ME patients worldwide need to get behind Dr David Tuller and help crowdfund his work
Here is a brief history and summary to explain where ME is now 'at' in the UK, specifically England, and why this matters:
Maybe the following have rankled Prof Sharpe and perhaps embody another good reason why ME patients worldwide need to get behind Dr David Tuller and help crowdfund his work
Here is a brief history and summary to explain where ME is now 'at' in the UK, specifically England, and why this matters:
- In 2006 David Clark set up the IAPT - Improving Access to Psychological therapies - programme in England along with Lord Richard Layard and it has been progressively rolled out across the country since then.
- The idea is that by offering psych therapies (mainly CBT) to people with anxiety/depression (to keep them in work or get them back to work) the IAPT programme will pay for itself through reduced welfare benefits and increased productivity, but also key is that it will also pay for itself within the NHS budget. How? By enrolling patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) and Long Term Conditions (LTC) they will reduce the NHS budget by stopping unnecessary referrals and investigations. To put it another way, they see LTC and MUS patients as resource wasters, and this waste will be removed from the system by labelling these patients as psych cases and pushing them into IAPT instead.
- How much money? They say that MUS alone costs the NHS £3.1 billion a year, and that MUS accounts for up to 30% of GP consultations and up to 50% or more of secondary care outpatient appointments. They run targeted GP training courses and conferences where they promulgate this information to GPs, specialists and NHS commissioners.
- Per Fink trained GPs for the Berkshire IAPT LTC/MUS roll-out - VLE – Frequently Asked Questions - UK Government Web Archive
- ME/CFS is deemed a sizeable component of MUS and the diversion of LTC and MUS patients into psychological therapies is now a major part of the IAPT programme. Under IAPT, ME/CFS patients are made to do CBT and GET. (Some IAPT centres are co-located at welfare benefit offices/job centres - http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/clinica...be-co-located-in-job-centres/20009490.article .) IAPT outcomes are recorded at every session and PHQ-9, GAD-7 and Chalder Fatigue forms are utilized. All data collected is fed into a massive NHS database designed to show how effective the programme is at reducing costs.
- The plan is to clinically code patients to stop other health professionals wasting resources on them - Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS) - London Health Programmes . GP records can be trawled with a specially designed computer app to help identify MUS patients on the basis of factors including - age, multiple pain sites, chronic fatigue, prescription of painkillers and antidepressants and life stress . The IAPT database is used to link up the collected individual patient’s data from IAPT with primary and secondary health records data (all apparently pseudonymized) to calculate how much individual patients are costing the NHS.
- Clark and Layard are seeking to roll out their programme internationally - Clark IAPT SW ERG Nov 2014 v2 (see slide 2 of 35) under the guise of a ‘Happiness’ agenda - http://www.actionforhappiness.org/why-happiness and https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thrive-Psychological-Therapy-Richard-Layard/dp/0241961114
- Michael Sharpe is involved in the IAPT programme – The IAPT Pathway for People with Long-term Physical Health ...
- David Tuller plans to look at the MUS agenda in the forthcoming year - https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/9730 .
- Michael Sharpe is now trying to stop David Tuller’s crowdfunding effort -
- David Clark is a Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. From 2000 to 2011 he held the Chair of Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London. He was awarded a CBE in the same News Year Honours List (2013) as Simon Wessely - https://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/news/records/2013/January/New-Years-Honours.aspx . He is National Clinical and Informatics Advisor for the IAPT programme under NHS England - http://www.magd.ox.ac.uk/member-of-staff/david-clark/
- Michael Sharpe is Professor of Psychological Medicine at the University of Oxford. He was a lead investigator of the PACE trial. He was given the 'Psychiatrist of the Year' award in 2014 by the Royal College of Psychiatrists https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/news/winners-of-the-rcpsych-awards-2014-announced soon after Simon Wessely became President.