Unpacking the Government’s 10-year Health Plan – Part 2

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

In Part 1 of this blog series, we explored how the work underway in the CAMHS Digital Lab aligns with the Government’s ambitions for digital innovation in transforming mental health care. In Part 2, we turn our attention to the NHS Long Term Plan—highlighting the areas where key questions remain. How can we ensure that the shift to digital delivers meaningful improvements for children and young people’s mental health? And what needs to happen to make that vision a reality?

Digital inclusion 

We welcome the recognition that increasing the use of digital solutions relies both on the digital inclusion of service users and digital upskilling for staff. It is important to acknowledge that the ‘digital divide’ for service users is not only caused by unequal access to digital devices, but also factors like gender and ethnicity. This complex picture of intersecting inequalities needs to be addressed when creating and implementing integrated, equitable digital services.  

The roles and risks of AI 

We are highly interested in the use of AI-assisted diagnostics, which the plan suggests could offer 24/7 virtual support for people with mild to moderate mental health needs, and remote monitoring for those with more severe conditions to enable faster crisis response.  However, a word of caution here. It is not entirely clear how the benefits of AI-enabled diagnostics – which have shown success in areas like dermatology – will translate into mental healthcare.   The Plan mentions using digital tools like online therapies and real-time digital suicide surveillance as ways to reduce suicide rates. Unsupervised AI-assisted mental health therapies are associated with a number of dangers, from failure to recognise suicidal forms of thinking to actively encouraging dangerous behaviours. Even if AI is not involved, the crisis management of acute mental health symptoms, including suicidality, is a complex clinical issue. In some cases remote tools like suicide helplines can be useful, e.g., suicide helplines, but they must be backed by robust systems that ensure people at high risk of harm are identified and referred to appropriate support. Additionally, the evidence base for suicide helplines indicates further work is required to understand what types of crisis management work, when, and for whom.  

Areas of caution 

A few areas where we would have liked to see more focus in the plan are: 

• Signposting to well curated resources. While the launch of ‘a new AI-powered digital tool to provide more personalised health advice’ sounds promising, service users deserve expert-written, evidence-based resources. We have signposted mental health resources to families waiting to be seen by CAMHS through the ‘Virtual Waiting Room’ on myHealthE. AI-driven technology may be able to collate useful information for service users, but this does not replace effective curation of, and signposting to, resources designed by experts. Service users also deserve the opportunity to discuss this health information with clinicians to interpret what it means for them. In the age of widespread access to unmoderated information about mental health, especially through social media, access to health information which is evidence-based, accessible, and culturally-sensitive is essential.  

• Using outcome measures to personalise treatment. The focus on collecting outcome measures in the Plan was primarily about making this data public to allow patients to decide which services they want to receive care from. However, the primary purpose of these outcome measures in mental healthcare is to support individual clinical care: they give service users and clinicians more data to use when making clinical decisions. Without proper context and management, the Government proposing to use data in this unintended way risks it being misinterpreted; think of Goodhart’s law: ‘when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’. We need to consider the best way of providing patients and clinicians with the data they need in a way that values their choice and decision-making while not introducing these risks.

• Children’s mental health needs. We welcome the level of focus given to children’s mental health within the Plan. However, there was little mention of how the mental health needs of children and young people differ from that of adults, and how this should be reflected in differences in service models and patient care.

• Supporting caregivers. Parents and caregivers are key participants in their child’s journey through CAMHS. There was not enough acknowledgement of caregivers’ role in children’s mental healthcare. 

Overall, the plan’s focus on improving, streamlining, and expanding forms of digital and remote data collection, and using this health intelligence to improve services, is encouraging.  As researchers and clinicians with a strong interest in digital health, we’re excited by the potential of sophisticated data monitoring systems. However, we also recognise that for these tools to be effective, they must be simple, robust, and user-led. Technology should simplify service delivery, not complicate it.  At the same time, digital innovation cannot be a substitute for addressing long-standing challenges in mental healthcare. Reducing treatment wait times and delivering long-promised service improvements—such as integrated care and expanded community-based services—remain critical. While the plan highlights a shift toward integrated community care, what this means in practice for mental health services is still unclear. Building effective partnerships across diverse clinical structures and communities with varying needs will require meaningful input from clinicians, families, and service users, alongside better data.   Improvements in data collection can translate into improved outcomes for young people and their families – but not always. We hope to be able to contribute what we have learned about the barriers and facilitators affecting the translation of health informatics into patient outcomes to the implementation of this plan: ultimately improving mental health for children, young people, and their families.  

Acknowledgements

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