With limited therapeutic resources, increasing demands for behavioural psychotherapy impose rationing by long waiting lists. Every patient taken on for treatment denies it to another who has to wait. Given this constraint, therapists can help many more patients by concentrating their scarce time on sufferers likely to show tangible improvement with brief treatment. This policy was applied to the treatment of 42 neurotics (mainly phobics and obsessive-compulsives) who completed exposure treatment with nurse-therapists in a mean of 9 sessions (16 hours). A cost-effectiveness study was mounted of the year before and after treatment.