A NATIONAL team has described East Lancashire’s mental health provider as the ‘worst’ for providing accurate data about its services.

Problems arose during a review of ‘Improving Access to Psychological Therapies’ (IAPT) in May, which resulted in officials describing Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust as being ‘singularly the worst trust the National IAPT team have reviewed in terms of data provision and accuracy’, according to NHS papers.

Board members at Blackburn with Darwen Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) said they had also raised concerns about the issue, as it is affecting their ability to monitor how well services are performing.

Dr Chris Clayton, chief clinical officer, said board level discussions have been held to try and address the issue.

Performance monitoring is a crucial function for CCGs, as it can highlight areas which need to be improved.

Last year Blackburn with Darwen CCG discovered that the average waiting time for counselling services in the borough had risen to a year, despite the target being just 28 days.

After an intervention from the CCG, including some extra cash, the average waiting time was reduced to just seven days.

Sue Moore, chief operating officer for Lancashire Care, said: “The trust recently invited the national Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) project team to review our current systems and processes for the IAPT services we provide.

“The project team acknowledged the challenges facing the trust around its data collection and a plan was immediately put into place to improve this.

“Our IAPT services have already made significant improvements which have been reported to our commissioners.”