Unpacking the Government’s 10-year Health Plan – Part 1

This blog is a collaboration with the King's Maudsley partnership, and is also hosted on their website.

The Government recently released its 10-year Plan for the NHS. After an initial reaction, we have spent the past few weeks reading the plan and discussing it with colleagues in clinical services.  We are encouraged to see a shift to digital named as a key operational driver of change across the NHS. At the CAMHS Digital Lab, we create digital innovations and health informatics to support children and young people’s mental health services. Our work aligns with the plan in many ways – placing prevention, community care, and digital innovation at the heart of clinical services. Read on to find out more about how the CAMHS Digital Lab is already delivering on key ambitions in the 10-year Plan.   

Digital innovations that provide clinicians with more data to support decision-making.  We were pleased to see encouragement for NHS providers to make better use of IT systems, supporting activities like collecting outcome measures from patients as well as using dashboards designed for clinicians to visualise data. With the support of our NHS colleagues, we have successfully developed and implemented these technologies across our local CAMHS teams in Southwark, Lambeth, Lewisham and Croydon. We were interested in the emphasis on the use of ambient voice technology (AVT) to support clinicians by, for example, streamlining note taking. We agree that there is a lot of the potential for these technologies to reduce the administrative burden on clinicians, improve their job satisfaction, and provide more time for patients. There are still questions to be answered to ensure these tools are accurate across different clinical specialties and the needs of different patient groups. We hope to address some of these questions as we prepare for a trial we are conducting of AVT in Croydon and Lambeth CAMHS in partnership with Anathem.

Early intervention and prevention. These were named as critical to supporting children and young people’s mental health, with schools identified as key to implementing this ambition. Our work within the Maudsley Education Consultation Service has supported schools to understand and improve their students’ mental health. Together, we implemented our co-designed myJournE app, developed for students, caregivers, and teachers to monitor mental health risk factors and outcomes, and provide school leaders with a comprehensive, whole school mental health needs assessment. We are also supporting a pioneering pilot of digitally delivered Single Session Interventions for adolescents with anxiety and depression who are on the waiting list for community CAMHS. The goal is to provide short and accessible support to teens who may otherwise be at risk of deteriorating mental health while waiting to access CAMHS. 

In line with the early intervention and prevention aim, the plan highlighted how increasing the collection of information on children’s mental health – i.e., remote monitoring – can support earlier intervention and improve clinical decision-making. This starts in early childhood, with the plan outlining plans to move to the use of a digital ‘e-red book’. In our work within Gen2020, we’re developing a digital platform to track early developmental milestones, aiming to help parents and early childhood services accurately track development and access support more efficiently. We appreciated the Plan’s support for further expansion of data collection across different health services, including patient-reported outcome measures like those we have collected from children and young people through the myHealthE platform. Likewise, wearables – wearable devices like watches that monitor health data such as movement and heartrate – are valuable sources of information. Through our PACES+ project, we have brought wearables into mental health, piloting a device to track activity levels in children and young people trying to find the right dose of  ADHD medication. To support this ambition, we could also monitor mood through apps such as myJournE, currently in use in the international AIMS 2 Trials study capturing the daily experiences of autistic young people. The Plan also highlighted the need for improved ways of assessing the implementation of digital technologies in clinical services, as we are doing through our Digital Therapeutics Assessment Group. 

We’re sharing this work not just to highlight achievements, but to celebrate the parts of the plan that are grounded in strong evidence and are already making a difference in clinical settings. These uses of digital innovation and focus on early detection and prevention also aligns with other NHS priorities like the UK clinical research system transformation. Across our services, we’ve seen how digital innovation can transform the way we support children and young people’s mental health. This innovation is helping families feel more informed and empowered, while giving clinicians more time to focus on what matters most: working closely with families to deliver personalised, effective, and joined-up care. 

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Dr. Shuo Zhang and Jessica Penhallow for their support in preparing these blogs.