It Takes A Village: expanding the reach of child mental health services through community involvement and clinical staging
It Takes A Village (ITAV) is an NHS and University research programme developing and testing a new approach to assessing and supporting young people who experience mental health problems.
Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) are overstretched. Many cannot access appropriate assessment and treatment, and suicide rates are increasing. There are not enough staff to cope with the long waiting lists. Radical innovation is needed. In poorer countries, staffing problems have been solved using a "scalability framework" where members of the community are trained and supported by expert clinicians to provide appropriate assessments and treatments. We aim to translate these techniques developed in poorer countries to the UK, to bridge the gap between GP-based mental health services and CAMHS.
Over five years, we plan to develop a UK scalability framework in which appropriate assessments and treatments will be delivered by Community and Lay Practitioners (CLPs). The framework will target early-stage anxiety and depression in children and young people (11-18 years), to prevent worsening of their mental health. We will develop this in partnership with community partners (e.g. school counsellors and lay people) and clinicians (psychologists, nurse therapists, psychiatrists), a community-clinician-coalition will be formed to test implementation in practice. We will train and support CLPs to deliver appropriate assessments and treatments for anxiety and depression.
We are developing a digital assessment platform to support appropriate assessment. We will work with our community-clinician-coalition and scientific experts to see how this works in practice.
We will then test the innovation scalability framework. We will involve around 300 children and young people with early-stage anxiety and depression, offering them (randomly) either usual services or the scalability framework (i.e. CLP-delivered assessment and treatment). We will follow them up after one year to see if the scalabilty framework can prevent their problems getting worse.
Throughout, we will work closely with young people who have experienced depression and anxiety, and their parents or carers, and with our community-clinician-coalition, to think ahead about how our scalability framework could work in practice. If successful, this work will transform outcomes for children and young people with anxiety and depression through prevention, early identification and appropriate, timely treatment.
Email us if you would you like to get involved or find out more: it-takes-a-village@gla.systa-s.com
Principal Investigators
Professor Helen Minnis and Dr Ruchika Gajwani
Centre for Developmental Adversity and Resilience (CeDAR), University of Glasgow, Clarice Pears Building, Level 2, 90 Byres Road, Glasgow, G12 0TB.