The STADIA trial, commissioned and funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), focuses on children and young people with emotional difficulties who have been referred to Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS).
Despite the challenges facing many research projects over the last year, the team at Nottinghamshire Healthcare have worked tirelessly to ensure STADIA continues to run safely and successfully.
In the UK, levels of mental health difficulties among children and young people were increasing even before the onset of the pandemic. Despite this, there are considerable barriers to receiving the right support for families.
The trial, led by Chief Investigator Kapil Sayal, is investigating whether the use of a standard information-gathering package - completed just after the referral has been received - helps with the assessment and diagnosis process.
Recruitment to the STADIA trial commenced in August 2019. Sadly, the coronavirus pandemic had an impact on STADIA recruitment in a number of ways including changes to working practices within CAMHS and the partial move towards remote working. There was a considerable initial reduction in routine referrals to CAMHS during the first lockdown (reducing the number of potential study participants) and an increase in the proportion of complex and urgent referrals.
Despite these challenges, STADIA has remained open to recruitment throughout this period and we have successfully recruited well over 500 study participants since March 2020.
Lead researcher, Paula Brown puts the success of STADIA down to several factors, including excellent communication and collaboration between the study teams, the local CAMHS ‘Single Point of Access’ (SPA) team, and the parents and young people taking part in the study. In addition, the local Research Delivery Team have worked hard to ensure the smooth running of STADIA whilst having to shift their attention to urgent public health studies.
The online nature of the study activities and the intervention has also enabled it to continue safely when many face-to-face research projects were paused. All contacts with participants are done by telephone, email and online. It has therefore been possible for researchers to continue all aspects of the trial whilst working remotely. This has been very helpful in recent months but will also continue to be a major benefit going forwards. The focus of the trial, on remote assessment in CAMHS, is also now especially timely as clinical services have had to adopt new ways of working due to the pandemic.
The input from the STADIA PPI Advisory Panels (one for young people and one for parents) has been vital in guiding us how to best support recruitment and engage participants throughout the study period. A number of other strategies have enabled us to ensure the continued successful delivery of the trial; these include wherever possible increasing researcher capacity at sites (facilitated by the ability of researchers to work on the study remotely), opening the study to new sites as well as to additional clinics within existing sites, increasing the frequency of researcher teleconferences to share good practice and regular newsletters and updates for STADIA participants.
Find out more about STADIA here.