Outcome Measures for UK Therapists: What You Can Actually Use, and Under What Licence (2026)

Why this is now a commercial question

Ten years ago, measuring outcomes in private practice was mostly a matter of professional conviction. That is changing for three reasons.

Third party payers ask. Employee assistance programmes, insurers and organisational contracts increasingly want some evidence that the work is doing something, and a pre and post score is the cheapest form of evidence to produce. Counselling agencies and CICs are asked for it by funders as a condition of the money. And a growing number of clients ask directly, because the idea of tracking progress has spread from healthcare generally into how people think about therapy.

The measures UK talking therapists actually use

The CORE family. CORE-OM is the 34 item original, covering wellbeing, problems and symptoms, functioning, and risk. CORE-10 is the ten item short form designed for sessional use. There are others, including CORE-5, GP-CORE and YP-CORE for young people. CORE is the closest thing UK counselling has to a default, partly because it was designed here and partly because there is a large benchmarking literature behind it.

PHQ-9 and GAD-7. Nine items for depression severity, seven for generalised anxiety. Ubiquitous in UK primary care and NHS talking therapies, which makes them the common language if you ever correspond with a GP or work alongside an NHS service.

WEMWBS and SWEMWBS. The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale and its seven item short form. Positively framed and measuring wellbeing rather than symptoms, which some clients find considerably less grim to complete.

ORS and SRS. The Outcome Rating Scale and Session Rating Scale, four items each, designed for feedback informed treatment. Quick enough to use every session, and the SRS is one of the few measures that asks about the alliance rather than the client.

Others you will meet. IES-R and PCL-5 for trauma, the WSAS for functional impairment, and modality specific measures. If you work in a specialism, your specialism has its own.

The licensing position, which is the part nobody explains

This is the section worth reading twice, because it is where practices unknowingly step over a line, and where software vendors are sometimes vague.

Three practical consequences follow.

The CORE no derivatives condition is stricter than it sounds. You cannot reword items, drop items, or restyle the form into something that changes it. The CORE System Trust has published guidance on what can and cannot be adjusted, and some administrative elements such as the demographic boxes at the top or the scoring instructions can reasonably be removed when the software handles them. What cannot go is the copyright line, which must be visible to the end user. If a platform shows you CORE-10 with no attribution anywhere, that is a signal worth following up.

ORS and SRS in software is the one to check. If a platform advertises ORS or SRS as a built in digital measure, it needs to be doing that through an authorised route. Your free individual licence covers paper. It does not cover a client tapping through it on their phone.

WEMWBS in a private practice is commercial use. Private practice is not a non-commercial setting. If you are using WEMWBS with clients you are paying to see you, you need the appropriate licence, and so does any software presenting it to your clients.

None of this means you should avoid these measures. It means you should know which of them your software has actually cleared, and not assume that because it appears in a dropdown, someone has done the paperwork.

Five questions to ask any platform

1. Which measures are included, and under what licence. Ask for the specific answer, not the feature bullet. A good vendor can tell you which measures they have cleared and how. A vague answer here is informative.

2. Is the copyright attribution shown to the client. For CORE this is a condition of use rather than a nicety. Open the client facing view during your trial and look.

3. Can the client complete it remotely, and how does it reach them. A secure portal is materially different from an emailed PDF, both in terms of completion rates and in terms of what you are transmitting. Health data by unencrypted email is a decision, not an accident.

4. Is scoring automatic, and can you see change over time. A measure that produces a number you then have to plot yourself will be abandoned within a term. Look for the graph, and for whether it appears in the client record rather than in a separate reporting area.

5. Can you export the raw scores. If you ever want to say something about your own outcomes, or hand a dataset to a funder, or move platforms, you need the underlying data rather than a picture of it.

The data protection angle

An outcome score is information about someone's mental health. It is special category data under UK GDPR, and it should be treated with the same care as a session note rather than as an administrative field.

Three things follow. Send and collect measures through a secure route rather than plain email. Decide whether administrative staff in a group practice should see scores, because in most platforms they will unless you configure otherwise, and a receptionist has no reason to see a client's PHQ-9 history. And include outcome data in your retention policy explicitly, because it is often stored separately from the clinical record and quietly outlives it.

Using measures without creating admin you abandon

The reason most private practices stop using outcome measures is not principle. It is that the workflow was three minutes of admin per session and nobody sustains that.

What works is narrow. Pick one sessional measure and one review measure, not five. CORE-10 sessionally and CORE-OM at intake and ending is a common and defensible pairing. Have the client complete it before the session rather than in it, through a portal link that arrives with the appointment reminder, so it costs you nothing and costs them ninety seconds. Look at the score before the session rather than filing it after. And discuss it with the client, because a measure the client never hears about is surveillance, whereas a measure you look at together is part of the work, and it dramatically improves completion rates.

Then leave it alone for six months before you decide whether it is telling you anything.

What My-Therapy-Suite does here

Eleven of the most widely used outcome measures are built in and ready to use, CORE-10, PHQ-9, GAD-7, PCL-5 and the WSAS among them, presented as their rights holders intend and within their licensing terms. Measures we cannot ship under their licence, WEMWBS and the ORS and SRS among them, are not in the built-in set, and that is the reason rather than an oversight. That last part is the work most people never see, and it is the reason we are cautious about which measures we ship and how.

Alongside the built in set, there is an AI assessment builder for the case the built in set does not cover. If you use your own intake questionnaire, a bespoke review form, or a measure specific to your specialism, you can describe it and the system will build it for you to use and refine. This is genuinely useful for the forms that are yours to shape. You can see how it works in the assessment builder demo.

Whichever measure you use, the workflow is the same. Send it to a client through the secure client portal, where they complete it in their own time in a protected environment, or work through it together in the session, directly on your side of the platform. Scores are stored and tracked in the client file automatically, so change over time sits in the record rather than in a separate spreadsheet, and it is there the next time you open the file.

Frequently asked questions

About this guide

Written by the team at My-Therapy-Suite, a UK practice management platform for talking therapists. We build one of the tools that presents these measures, and we have said so. Licensing terms are set by the copyright holders and can change, so verify the current position directly with the CORE System Trust, the University of Warwick, or the relevant rights holder before you rely on anything here. Nothing in this guide is legal advice. Last updated September 2026.