This guide has been developed in collaboration with the Children and Young People’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) London & South East Learning Collaborative. It looks at outcome measures that may be meaningful and realistic for commissioners of children ang young people mental health services.

Many national key performance indicators currently focus on access and waiting times but these are only important if people are being treated effectively. Figures about activity and throughputs of services allow you to see what a service is doing to some extent, but they do not tell you about the difference they are making for the people using them or the quality of the service: the clinical outcomes.

There is now a nationwide push towards measuring clinical outcomes and an expectation that all service providers should be transparent and be commissioned based on the impact they are having on children and young peoples lives.