How can we better understand whether a treatment will work for a young person?
Mental illness affects one in ten children in the UK. But many are going without the right treatment, or experiencing long delays to get the right support.
A major challenge is that we don’t know enough about how factors such as age, gender, ethnicity and type and severity of condition impact a treatment’s success, so children are left with a treatment that doesn’t work well for them.
Dr Miranda Wolpert and her team at University College London are working to establish the impact these factors have, with the aim of enabling young people, carers and clinicians to choose the most effective support and set realistic, personalised goals for therapy.
Miranda and her team are combining large anonymised datasets detailing demographic information, the types of services children have accessed and whether they were successful, enabling them to better analyse how effective treatments are for different young people.
They will look to answer the following questions:
With a greater understanding of all the different factors at play, we’ll be able to ensure more children are receiving the right care, at the right time.
With some children currently having to wait years to get the right support for them, enduring unnecessary and sometimes negative side-effects, this could transform the lives of many young people.
And as well as providing essential help to the individual child in need – it will also help to make services more efficient and cost-effective.
Dr Miranda Wolpert is Professor of Evidence Based Practice at UCL, and Director of the Evidence Based Practice Unit, a service which works to bridge evidence and practice in child mental health.
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