FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (21 OCTOBER)
Innovative Oxford child anxiety treatment to be rolled out internationally
An effective online treatment for childhood anxiety developed by a team at the University of Oxford is to be adapted and tested in five countries in Asia and South America, with the aim of driving widespread implementation in the future.
The Online Support and Intervention (OSI) tool is a brief therapist-guided, parent-led online Cognitive Behaviour Therapy platform for treating anxiety problems in children aged 5-12 years.
Funded by Wellcome, the new £7 million project will see researchers and clinicians in seven countries working together with commercial partners and lived experience experts to adapt, test and deliver the tool in Japan, Chile, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand. Reaching 1,600 children, the team aims to ensure that OSI works in a variety of different contexts and create the conditions for it to be rolled out quickly and sustainably at scale.
Trials in the UK have shown that OSI is both clinically and cost effective, reducing therapist time and also achieving excellent outcomes when delivered by non-expert practitioners. This makes it particularly suitable for delivery in places where mental health support is not easily accessible for children and young people.
OSI was recommended by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) in an Early Value Assessment in the UK and is already being delivered in child mental health services.
Professor Cathy Creswell, Paul Foundation Professor of Developmental Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford, who developed OSI and is leading the project, said: “We are incredibly grateful for this funding from Wellcome, which will accelerate and amplify the global reach of our Online Support and Intervention tool. OSI is proven to be an efficient and effective treatment for anxiety disorders in children in the UK, so it is very exciting to be able to make it available to children and their families in other countries across the world. Our collaborative and multidisciplinary team of experts will help us ensure we adapt and refine the tool so it can be implemented at scale in a variety of contexts, so that more children and their families can benefit as quickly as possible.”
The project will have several phases, which involve adapting and refining OSI for different contexts, testing the different versions and evaluating their effectiveness, and creating the right systems and approaches to enable it to be rolled out at scale rapidly beyond the research study. The project will have a focus on collaboration and shared learning, lived experience involvement, and building research skills and capacity. OSI has already had positive feedback in studies in Iceland, which is one of the other partner countries, where it is now being rolled out nationally.
Dr Miguel Cordero Vega, Associate Professor at the Universidad del Desarrollo, will lead the work in Chile. He said: “Chile has a relatively strong healthcare system, but access to mental health care for children and adolescents remains limited. This new funded research programme will involve schools in adapting and evaluating the impact of delivering digital mental health support through OSI. Within five years, we hope to have contributed to improving access to evidence-based digital mental health services in Chile, and will share these lessons more widely across Latin America.”
Dr John Jamir Benzon Aruta, from De La Salle university in the Philippines, said: "The Philippines has a very young population but some of the world’s scarcest child mental health services. With so few specialist providers and many children living far from services, we need solutions that travel to families, not the other way around. OSI will let us test what works in real-world settings across the Philippines and generate the evidence local governments need to invest in child mental health at a sustainable, national scale."
The project will also be supported by The Global Health Network, based in the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine, which will help promote effective collaboration and embed equity throughout the research and implementation programme.
Professor Trudie Lang, Head of the Global Health Network, says: “We are excited to be collaborating on this important project. This is about taking a remarkable innovation that has shown impressive benefit to young people and their mental health in UK clinical trials, and assessing through a multi-centre trial whether this can be a useful tool globally in the fight against mental health challenges in young people. The global health network works to enable high quality research across the globe, connecting teams and supporting the transfer and sharing of knowledge and skills. We are therefore honoured to apply these approaches to supporting this ground-breaking trial and we look forward to working with our colleagues and bringing some innovative approaches such as building local data science systems and new methods to enable lasting skills and abilities to be embedded in these teams beyond this trial.”
OSI was originally developed and evaluated with support from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), Medical Research Council, the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Oxford and Thames Valley and the NIHR Oxford Health NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. It is being implemented in the UK by Koa Health, supported by BitJam Ltd, who will be the commercial partners on this project.
Dr Oliver Harrison, Founder CEO of Koa Health, said: “Koa Health is driven by a vision of mental health for everyone. In this context, our team is excited by the potential of our collaborative research, led by Professor Cathy Creswell, and involving a great set of collaborators, to bring the benefits of the Online Support and Intervention (OSI) programmes to five additional countries. Koa Health will be bringing its expertise in technology, regulation, reimbursement, and scale-up to the consortium. We look forward to working together to localise the OSI programmes and demonstrate their effectiveness and cost-effectiveness as a prelude to delivering benefits to children and their families around the world.”
Tayla McCloud, Research Lead in Digital Mental Health at Wellcome, said: “Digital interventions have the potential to transform access to mental health care globally. Since many mental health conditions begin in childhood and can persist throughout life, early intervention is critical. That’s why we’re so pleased to support the development of OSI - an evidence-based, scalable solution that empowers families and helps prevent anxiety from limiting young people’s futures. We look forward to seeing how this international collaboration advances the reach and impact of OSI worldwide.”
Professor Mara Violato at the University of Oxford is health economics lead for the project while Professor Obi Ukoumunne at the University of Exeter will be statistics lead.
ENDS
Lisa Jones, Communications Manager
Department of Psychiatry |University of Oxford | Warneford Hospital | Oxford | OX3 7JX
Tel: +44 (0)1865 618206 Mob: 07500 030841 | lisa.jones@psych.ox.ac.uk
Notes to editor:
- Read a paper about OSI in The Lancet Psychiatry: Digitally augmented, parent-led CBT versus treatment as usual for child anxiety problems in child mental health services in England and Northern Ireland: a pragmatic, non-inferiority, clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness randomised controlled trial
About the University of Oxford:
- The University Department of Psychiatry’s mission is to conduct world-class research, teach psychiatry to medical students, develop future researchers in a graduate programme, teach doctors in training, promote excellence in clinical practice, and develop and provide innovative clinical services. It supports research in four key areas: neurobiology, psychological treatments, developmental psychiatry and social psychiatry. The Department is committed to the translation of scientific discovery into benefits for patients. www.psych.ox.ac.uk
- The Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, under the headship of Professor Matthew Rushworth, includes over 40 research groups with upwards of 500 undergraduates, graduate students and researchers. Key areas of research include behavioural neuroscience, perception and cognition, as well as developmental psychology, social psychology, and clinical psychology.
- Oxford University has been placed number 1 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings for the eighth year running, and number 2 in the QS World Rankings 2022. At the heart of this success are the twin-pillars of our ground-breaking research and innovation and our distinctive educational offer.
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About the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Oxford and Thames Valley:
The NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) Oxford and Thames Valley, hosted by Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, is a partnership of regional health services, universities and industry which turns research into cost-saving and high-quality care through cutting-edge innovation. For further information, visit www.arc-oxtv.nihr.ac.uk
About the NIHR Oxford Health BRC (Biomedical Research Centre)
The NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre (NIHR OH BRC ) led by Professor Rachel Upthegrove is based at the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. The NIHR OH BRC is run-in partnership with the University of Oxford and involves 13 additional partner university and NHS Trusts across England. Support for infrastructure is provided by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) for 11 research Themes focused on brain health.
About the NIHR:
The mission of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) is to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research.
We do this by:
- funding high quality, timely research that benefits the NHS, public health and social care
- investing in world-class expertise, facilities and a skilled delivery workforce to translate discoveries into improved treatments and services
- partnering with patients, service users, carers and communities, improving the relevance, quality and impact of our research
- attracting, training and supporting the best researchers to tackle complex health and social care challenges
- collaborating with other public funders, charities and industry to help shape a cohesive and globally competitive research system
- funding applied global health research and training to meet the needs of the poorest people in low and middle income countries
NIHR is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care.
Our work in low and middle income countries is principally funded through UK international development funding from the UK government.