"Newcastle CBT Centre welcomes you to our service and this website"

I am a clinician working in the Newcastle Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) Centre. We work with people who have struggled to benefit from CBT provided at other locations or have complex needs that may not be met in other services. Thus we are commissioned to provide a regional service for the north-east of England. Our CBT is adapted to meet the individual needs of our patients and we provide some supplementary group work which may be appropriate for different people at different times in their therapy. The satisfaction our clinicians get is in working alongside people as they build their lives over the course of the therapy, often transforming their relationships with other people and the world. We help people find their own solutions to their problems and recognise that personalised approaches are most helpful for our patients.

We recently investigated how people who had been through our service did. We found that 57% of the people we see meet all their goals for therapy and that the effect of the package of care they receive on their symptoms is roughly equivalent to the effect of medication under clinical trial conditions. Whilst 43% don’t reach all their goals, some will have reached some of their goals. A recent survey of how patients found our service showed that our patients find our staff friendly, pleasant and respectful and the therapists caring, understanding and professional. We identified in the survey some difficulties associated with building signage and waiting area facilities. We are working to improve these.

We are also working towards engaging past and present patients to become stakeholders in our service by working with a service user group to set up a rolling programme of meetings. We hope eventually to have a group of people we can consult on various strategic developments as well as day to day care issues.

We hope that this website will enable patients who have been helped by our service to encourage others to come along. We also want to hear from those who have not gained so much and have been unable to contribute to our patient feedback system. We hope that this will help us to continue to develop and help more people move further along their journey of recovery.