Together with NHS Scotland, ieso are expanding the reach of typed Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), empowering individuals facing common mental health conditions like anxiety or depression to access one-to-one care from clinicians conveniently at a time and place that suits them. ieso were awarded a multi-year national contract with NHS Scotland starting from 1st December 2023 to continue delivering typed therapy across all 14 health boards.
ieso’s digitally enabled, evidence-based typed therapy is available for people aged 16+ and comes with shorter waits for treatment (typically two weeks) compared to traditional face-to-face therapy.
ieso is helping to make mental health treatment more accessible for everyone in both rural and urban areas across Scotland. With therapy sessions available 7 days a week, from 6am-11pm, patients can join sessions from anywhere they can connect their device to the internet.
All health boards in mainland Scotland can refer patients into ieso’s typed therapy service via their Psychology department in secondary care with some health boards (namely Tayside, Highland, Greater Glasgow & Clyde and Forth Valley) generating referrals from their primary care mental health teams.
Notably, ieso’s typed therapy can be particularly beneficial for populations in the remote Scottish Isles, where travel time for face-to-face health appointments of any type can be inconvenient, costly and time consuming. To make therapy more accessible, residents of the Western Isles, Shetland and Orkney health boards can self-refer themselves for typed therapy – ieso also run online campaigns to help raise awareness that this option is available to people living in these areas.
The benefits of ieso’s typed therapy service in comparison to traditional face-to-face therapy goes beyond just accessibility, however – other benefits can include:
- Time-saving – No need to travel, so less hassle and less wasted time.
- Confidential – Patients text with their therapist via a secure online platform. As the sessions are typed, no one will overhear their conversation.
- Guidance beyond therapy – Patients learn practical skills they can use in real life. They maintain their progress by accessing past sessions and activities in their account even after they’ve finished therapy.
- Life friendly – We fit sessions around patients’ commitments (i.e. childcare or work).
- Support between sessions – Patients can message with their therapist in-between sessions for support with tasks.
ieso’s typed therapy platform captures, with permission, the exchange between a therapist and patient. In accordance with our Responsible Innovation principles, this allows the collection of a globally unique, de-identified dataset that we’re using to increase the quality and effectiveness of therapy, conduct high-quality scientific research and develop the next generation of digital mental health products.
If you work in the Psychology team of your NHS Scotland health board and would like to learn more about how ieso’s typed therapy service can help your populations, reach out to Arif on LinkedIn, or at a.hussain@iesohealth.com, or come to the ieso booth at Futurescot Health and Care Transformation in Glasgow on the 16th April. Follow ieso on LinkedIn to keep up with our latest news.