Active Mental Health

Sustaining and Scaling Online Support and Intervention (OSI) for child anxiety problems in diverse international settings

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A therapist-guided online programme for child anxiety, originally developed in England, is being tested for use in Japan, Chile, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand. Anxiety disorders affect roughly one in ten children worldwide, yet most never receive treatment. In-person therapy is scarce, expensive, and culturally specific. The existing platform—called Online Support and Intervention (OSI)—already works in the UK, cutting therapist time and allowing non-specialists to deliver effective care. But a programme designed for English families may not translate directly to other cultures, languages, or healthcare systems. This project adapts OSI for each new country, refines how children are identified and assessed, tests whether the adapted procedures are feasible, and then evaluates real-world clinical and cost-effectiveness. The researchers will also pool data across all sites to extract broader lessons and establish conditions for rapid, large-scale rollout. If successful, OSI could become a scalable, low-cost mental health tool for child anxiety in diverse global settings—reaching families who currently have no access to help. The work is applied and implementation-focused, with no fundamental science component.

View original technical description
Online Support and Intervention (OSI) is a brief therapist-guided, parent-led online Cognitive Behaviour Therapy platform for treating anxiety problems in children aged 5-12 years. OSI was codesigned with children, parents/carers, and clinicians in England, has proven clinical and cost-effectiveness in the UK, and is now being implemented in English child mental health services by Koa Health. Using OSI reduces therapist time required which, coupled with excellent outcomes achieved by non-expert practitioners, underscores the potential to scale this approach in diverse settings. This collaboration between researchers, commercial partners, lived experience experts, and key stakeholders from the UK, Japan, Chile, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand aims to work across countries to maximise the intervention's applicability to diverse contexts, ultimately increasing its global reach while ensuring cultural relevance, stakeholder engagement, and rigorous evaluation across settings. We will:1. Adapt OSI for new settings and populations.2. Refine identification and assessment procedures for varied contexts.3. Test the feasibility of adapted procedures.4. Evaluate real-world clinical and cost-effectiveness5. Conduct pooled data analyses to maximise insights. 6. Establish the conditions for rapid at-scale implementation.7. Promote collaboration and shared learning, lived experience and wider stakeholder involvement, and research capacity building throughout.

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Researchers

Cathy Creswell (EPMC Awardee)Erika Obikane (EPMC Awardee)Fareed Minhas (EPMC Awardee)John Jamir Benzon Aruta (EPMC Awardee)Miguel Cordero (EPMC Awardee)Nuttorn Pityaratstian (EPMC Awardee)Oliver Harrison (EPMC Awardee)Trudie Lang (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Online Support and Intervention for Anxiety (OSI) Autism
Clinical and cost-effectiveness of adapted online parent-led treatment compared to treatment as usual for autistic children with anxiety problems in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services: A randomised controlled trial
Child Anxiety Treatment in the context of COVID-19 (Co-CAT): Enabling Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) to provide efficient remote treatment for child anxiety problems (OSI)
Increasing access to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) for preadolescent children with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
Enabling Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) to provide efficient remote treatment for child anxiety problems in the COVID-19 context

Original classification

Mental Health Award: Accelerating scalable digital mental health interventions

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.