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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 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.
AT A GLANCE: OSI PROGRAMME IMPACT
Source: NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Oxford and Thames Valley |
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 Trudy 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 are 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 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.