Eleven months of the NES Matrix

Eleven months of the NES Matrix

Since the launch of the digital version of the NES Matrix, A guide to delivering psychological therapies and interventions in November 2023, the NES psychology team continues to work with stakeholders, ensuring the best evidence and implementation guidance for psychological therapies and interventions is available.

We appreciate the ongoing commitment from multi professional and multi-sector colleagues, and people with lived experience, to ensure these reflect both the best available evidence base and the Scottish context.

This resource is intended for:

• psychological therapists and practitioners delivering psychological interventions, to guide treatment decisions
• managers  who commission services , training and education, or support local governance arrangement and is designed to align with the requirement to meet the Scottish Government (2023) Psychological Therapies Specification
• those who make referrals to services for people with mental health difficulties to support decision making on who is most likely to benefit from psychological therapies and interventions
• members of the public to support informed and collaborative treatment planning around options for psychological therapies and interventions for themselves, their families and those they support

To date, 11 full evidence reviews have been published with a further five nearing completion.

There is now guidance available on best practice for delivering effective and accessible evidence based psychological therapies and interventions, recognising the needs of specific populations including:

• children and young people
• people in the peri-natal period
• autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people

And we continue to work to expand the range of these guides.

The Matrix also includes 26 ‘hexagon’ tools for psychological therapies and interventions which have sufficient evidence to be named in evidence tables. These provide further detailed information on evidence, training and education pathways and governance requirements including supervision.

We continue to raise awareness of the resource through regular communication with stakeholders and webinars, and since April 2024 we continue to see growth in the use of the resource with 2,849 users.

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