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.
The project will involve 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.
Read the full story on the Department of Psychiatry website.