Month: February 2016

We have new and very exciting placement opportunities for current UoR second year students. A placement with us offers invaluable experience for students interested in clinical psychology or clinical research. Please click here to find out more!...

Dr Claire Hill (Clinical Psychologist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow) is leading on an innovative project within AnDY, developing and evaluating an online treatment programme for childhood anxiety disorders. This will be based on an evidence-based treatment approach, in which the therapist works with the parent to guide them in how to help their child overcome their anxiety. By providing this treatment online, with “virtual” sessions with a therapist instead of coming into the clinic, we hope to be able to make the treatment more accessible to families as well as more efficient and therefore more cost-effective. With pressures to deliver more on less within Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), it is hoped that by offering online treatments as a treatment option for families it will improve access to evidence-based treatment. We are currently in the process of tendering for a website development company to build the website and accompanying apps, and hope to start development in Spring/early Summer....

  Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health disorders in children and young people. However, despite the availability of evidence-based treatments, many children are not accessing the specialist services they need. General Practitioners are often the first port of call for families concerned about their child and play a crucial, “gate-keeper” role to accessing such services. In order to better our understanding of why children are often not referred to specialist services, interviews were held with 20 GPs from a variety of locations in England, discussing their experience of managing childhood anxiety disorders. Emerging themes from these interviews suggest that that GPs experience numerous barriers including uncertainty around recognising anxiety in children, inadequate training, extensive waiting lists and difficulty accessing services. The results from this research will be used inform a further study, which will involve surveying a representative group of GPs, in order to quantify the barriers currently affecting GPs in England. The combination of the results from these studies...

On average two children in every UK classroom are experiencing anxieties, fears or worries that significantly affect their day-to-day life. At the moment, only a minority of these children are receiving professional help. We want to help ensure more children who are experiencing anxiety difficulties receive the help they need. Ten primary schools from across England are taking part in the I-CAT study. More than 350 children and their parents and teachers have completed questionnaires about the child’s anxiety. In cases where responses on the questionnaires indicate the child may be experiencing difficulties with anxiety, we are following up with families and offering more detailed assessments. We are then interviewing parents of children with an anxiety disorder to find out about their views and experiences of seeking professional help. These interviews are still ongoing but are highlighting the range of difficulties families can face seeking and accessing treatment for anxiety problems in children. Findings from the interviews will be analysed over...