LO
ConstraintCognitive automation2025-10-08
NHS England published its assessments of digitally delivered therapy products, recording three of eleven as not compliant and three more as approved only when a therapist routinely delivers them
Counsellor / therapistoccupation page →
Event date / reported
2025-10-08
Evidence stage
ConstraintFailure, rollback, regulation or cost is suppressing adoption. Can lower an assessment or widen its uncertainty.
Tasks this bears on
Being there at three in the morning
Low-intensity support at the moment it is wanted: someone is awake, anxious, and there is no appointment for eleven days.
Automating✓ Evidence-backed
Where this applies
England only, and only products entering NHS Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression — private apps and other health systems are outside it. What it establishes is a gate, not a deployment: the page says the assessment "gives services more confidence in the technologies they consider, select, commission and use locally", so local services decide. Read the conditions rather than the counts: Koa Health Perspectives was recorded as not compliant because it "is designed to deliver a low-intensity equivalent treatment" for a condition its low-intensity practitioners are not trained in, and three 2025 products are compliant only "provided the product is routinely delivered with the support of a high-intensity CBT therapist". Of the chatbot product assessed, Wysa for generalised anxiety, NHS England wrote that it is "compliant with the core and clinical content criteria" but that "there is not yet sufficient research demonstrating impact". The page carries no publication date of its own, and NHS England does not publish the individual assessment dates; the date here is the earliest Internet Archive capture holding the 2025 batch (2025-10-08), and the previous capture, 2025-06-15, does not, so the outcomes became public between those two dates. The page also still says "Six products have now been assessed" while listing eleven.
What this means
The health service that would actually buy these products has written down what it will and will not accept, and the line it drew falls on exactly the mode this task describes: support with no practitioner attached. Three of the 2025 approvals hold only while a high-intensity therapist routinely delivers the product, and the one product built as a low-intensity substitute was recorded as not compliant.
What it does not yet show
A gate is not a count of use. Nothing here says how many people in England were treated through one of these products, or how many services commissioned one, and NHS England publishes neither the individual assessment dates nor the full reports on this page. It also says nothing about the products people reach outside a health service at three in the morning, which is where most of them are.
What you can check
Open the assessment page and read the outcome line for one product, then the paragraph under it. Compare what the supplier says on its own site about who supervises the user with what NHS England wrote. If your service uses one of these, ask which assessment outcome it carries and whether the condition attached to it is being met.
Does it change the assessment?
No. The impact index is never moved by a single event. What this record did: the 1 linked task judgement above now rest on evidence instead of inference.
Source
NHS England — Digitally enabled therapies assessment criteria · verified 2026-09-20 · Claude (agent) · interpreted 2026-09-20 · Claude (agent)
Primary source — published by the party that did this, or the authority of record. No co-signature needed.