Service evaluation of HG Therapy for veterans

PTSD Resolution is a Registered Charity (No. 1133188) that offers human givens therapy* to UK armed forces’ veterans, reservists and their families to relieve a wide range of mental health problems resulting from military service and help ease reintegration into a normal work and family life.

They are the only service for veterans and their families that can deliver support promptly, locally, briefly and cost-effectively through the HGI-registered therapists, UK-wide. Veterans in prison also receive help.

PTSD Resolution (PTSD-R) does not insist on a formal diagnosis of PTSD and measures trauma symptoms via a recognised measure, the Impact of Event Scale (IES). This self-reporting measure allows both the individual and their therapist to gauge their progress through therapy.

In 2016, King’s College London’s military mental health unit carried out an evaluation of PTSD-R’s therapy outcomes and found that they are comparable to those provided by primary care therapy services in England (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies, IAPT – now known as NHS Talking Therapies). However, full comparison was challenging because of different outcome measures used.¹

In 2025, researchers from King’s College London published findings from another comparison of outcomes, this time using the recommendations of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for collecting ‘real world evidence’ – evidence collected from routine clin­ical practice, which includes data from a wide range of patients with varied characteristics, challenges and treatment histories. Evidence collected in line with the stringent requirements for real world evidence is deemed to provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of interventions.

The results were benchmarked against the NHS IAPT service in general, IAPT for veterans in particular and another service for veterans that followed IAPT procedures.

The study, published in Occupational Medicine, confirms that PTSD-R clients show similar improve­ment to IAPT patients, suggesting consistent results over time. “The current service evaluation found PTSD-R to have a recovery rate and reliable improvement rate in line with NHS England standards,” conclude the researchers.²

“The findings also show that treatment with PTSD-R had much higher acceptability, with a far lower dropout rate,” comments Bill Andrew, research coordinator for the study. “So not only are the results comparable with no statistical difference in recovery rates, but are based on a much higher percentage of people staying in treatment. In total, 82 per cent stayed to an agreed planned ending, compared with ‘completion’ rates in the NHS service (defined as attending at least two sessions) of around 55 per cent.”

*Sometimes referred to as HGT.