Guest editorial

In mainstream mental health services, there was a sudden move from face-to-face work to looking at new ways of working so that we could restore services as soon as possible. The problem for most services is that waiting lists were on hold for a while, then we had staff absences due to COVID resulting in a build of the waiting time as is common in all health services. In our service, we also had data previously collected on mental health and wellbeing assessment such as with the Psychological Therapies Outcome Scale ID II (Vlissides et al., 2017), which could be used to evaluate outcomes. [...]this is the body of research on psychological therapies generated by those at the coal face.