Peterborough and Cambridgeshire health trust secures £340,000 funding for mental health project

FAIR TREATMENT (Federated analytics and artificial intelligence research across trusted research environments for child and adolescent mental health) will help researchers to develop new methods to securely analyse data from different sources, including health, education and social care records,

This eight-month project is led by researchers and health professionals at CPFT and the University of Cambridge, with support from Eastern AHSN (Academic Health Science Network), and is one of nine national Sprint Exemplar Projects awarded over £2 million funding by Data and Analytics Research Environments (DARE) UK and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The team will work across three sites in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, Essex and Birmingham.

CPFT child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr Anna Moore is the Principal Investigator for FAIR TREATMENT. She said: “Negative aspects of a young person’s life can lead to poor mental health and providing support as soon as possible can make problems easier to treat, and prevent more severe problems later on. Research indicates that it’s possible to spot patterns in data from health, education and social care records to identify who needs this help early, but it’s difficult when this information is secured in different places.

“To solve the technical barriers, we will be combining new data technologies - Bitfount and InterMine- to link data securely whilst protecting individuals’ privacy, and supporting the development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to spot these patterns. A big part of the project is to consult with patients, the public, organisations, ethical and legal experts to agree the best way to oversee data use, and ensure it’s managed safely and fairly. We are working with the Anna Freud Centre to involve a wide range of people from diverse backgrounds.”

One of the guiding statements for the project is this poignant reflection from a mental health service user: “If I’d only had in my teens what I’ve had in my thirties, perhaps I wouldn’t have lost my twenties.”

FAIR TREATMENT will build on existing health data collaborations with health and social care providers across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough over three years, and will help to further develop the new CAM-Child database set up by CPFT and UoC researchers, which is designed to integrate information to support children and young people’s physical and mental health care.