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Duchess of Cambridge visits Anna Freud Centre to learn about NIA innovation ‘i-Thrive’

17 September 2015

Kate Middleton will visit the Anna Freud Centre in central London today to hear about how the centre treats children and young people with mental health issues.

Her visit will take place in the planned centre of excellence near Kings Cross, which will bring together the best people and organisations in neuroscience, mental health and education to work with children and their families.

“In bringing attention to child mental health she is doing one of the most important things she can do for this country,” saidProfessor Peter Fonagy, CEO of Anna Freud Centre and Programme Director for Mental Health at UCLPartners.

A key focus of the centre for excellence will be developing and testing new treatments, interventions and approaches to deliver better mental health services on a local, national and international level. One of these is THRIVE: a needs based model of care for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS).

  • THRIVE enables care to be provided according to the needs and preferences of the patient
  • Emphasis is placed on prevention and the promotion of mental health and wellbeing
  • Patients are empowered to be actively involved in decisions about their care through shared decision making.

THRIVE has been developed as a collaboration between the Anna Freud Centre and the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust and is being brought together with tools to support shared decision making in an implementation programme termed “i-THRIVE”. i-Thrive has been awarded NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) status, which Dr Anna Moore, NIA Fellow, is leading on behalf of the development partnership. The aim of the NIA is to create the conditions and cultural change necessary for proven innovations such as i-Thrive to be adopted faster and more systematically through the NHS. With the support of the NIA, Anna aims to implement i-Thrive effectively in a range of local health economies, developing approaches to application for other whole-system transformations.

The programme is hosted by UCLPartners and the Health Foundation, in partnership with NHS England and in collaboration with the 15 Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs) across the country who are providing national learning and expertise. Five of the AHSNs are formal partners to the programme overseeing its delivery and providing a contribution towards the cost of the bursaries offered to each of the fellows: East Midlands AHSN, Imperial College Health Partners, North West Coast AHSN, Yorkshire and Humber AHSN and UCLPartners.