An innovative online treatment for childhood anxiety developed by University of Oxford researchers with support from the NIHR ARC Oxford and Thames Valley is set to be adapted and tested across five countries, paving the way for widespread global implementation.
The Online Support and Intervention (OSI) platform – a brief, therapist-guided, parent-led cognitive behavioural therapy tool for children aged 5-12 – has secured £7 million in Wellcome funding to expand to Japan, Chile, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand, reaching 1,600 children.
ARC support accelerates impact
The NIHR ARC Oxford and Thames Valley played a crucial role in OSI's journey from research to real-world implementation. ARC funding provided vital bridging support that enabled OSI to continue being used after clinical trials ended and before it was licensed to commercial partner Koa Health, ensuring families could continue to benefit from the platform without interruption.
UK trials demonstrated that OSI is both clinically and cost-effective, reducing therapist time by 40% whilst maintaining excellent outcomes even when delivered by non-specialist practitioners. This efficiency makes it particularly valuable for settings where mental health support for children and young people is difficult to access.
OSI has already been recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) through an Early Value Assessment and is being delivered in child mental health services across England, including by Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust.
Professor Cathy Creswell, Paul Foundation Professor of Developmental Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford, who developed OSI and is leading the international 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."
Testing in diverse contexts
The project involves adapting and refining OSI for different cultural contexts, testing the adapted versions, evaluating their effectiveness, and creating systems to enable rapid rollout beyond the research study. The focus will be on collaboration, shared learning, lived experience involvement, and building research skills and capacity in partner countries.
Dr Miguel Cordero Vega, Associate Professor at the Universidad del Desarrollo in Chile, 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 added: "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."
Global collaboration for global impact
The Global Health Network, based in the University of Oxford's Nuffield Department of Medicine, will support the project by promoting effective collaboration and embedding equity throughout the research and implementation programme.
Professor Trudie Lang, Head of The Global Health Network, said: "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."
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 commercial partners on the international project.
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."