'Mind the Kids': an ACAMH podcast · The Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health

Inside the CAMHS Digital Lab: Apps AI and Young People's Mental Health

·49 min·3 clips

Only 5% of people regularly used the digital tools as intended.

Clara opens by introducing Mind the Kids as a place for the latest developments in child and adolescent mental health research and practice. She welcomes three guests from the CHEMS Digital Lab at the IOPPN in King's College London. The discussion is framed around translating digital innovation into CHEMS services, and it is tied to a paper published in the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Journal. Jonny describes the lab's work as broader than apps alone. Digital work, he explains, also includes the way data is curated and the methods that allow systems to talk to each other. That makes it possible to follow young people's education and employment outcomes without repeatedly asking them the same questions. He presents that as a practical response to attrition bias. In his view, the people most at risk are often the people most likely to drop out of long follow-up studies. Clara steers the conversation toward the pressures inside CHEMS itself. She raises long waiting lists. She also points to the fact that a significant share of referrals are rejected. That leads naturally into a discussion of pathways through care. The team asks what happens to young people after referral, especially when the service does not take them on. The conversation also returns to earlier work on trajectories of young people with depression. Clara refers to a paper using CRIS and CREATE. The point is not just to name datasets. It is to understand how young people's paths through care can be studied with more precision. Jonny and the others treat those trajectories as a key part of the picture. Zoe's role brings in the question of engagement. The lab works with young people in schools to find research methods they can accept and find interesting. That matters both for recruitment and for helping young people think about research findings in a meaningful way. The episode treats this as more than consultation. It is part of making the research usable. Alice's work is presented as central to the electronic healthcare record linkage effort. Clara notes how that kind of infrastructure helps the field catch up. Instead of relying only on repeated contact, researchers can connect data across systems. That can improve follow-up while reducing burden on participants. The conversation keeps a steady balance between ambition and caution. It recognizes that digital tools promise efficiency. It also shows that their value depends on how well they fit the realities of service use, school-based research, and long-term follow-up. The guests are careful not to confuse better data infrastructure with a complete solution. The point is to make the evidence base less brittle. There is also a broader comparative angle. Zoe reflects on population health research in Scandinavia and Sweden. She says those systems often feel enviable because so much is already linked. The episode does not turn that into a complaint. Instead, it uses the comparison to underline how useful better linkage could be in the UK. The result is a conversation that stays close to the research while repeatedly asking what it means in practice. It is about digital innovation, but also about pathways, measurement, follow-up, and the daily realities of child and adolescent mental health work.

As heard by us

A practical look at digital tools, linked data, and the harder problems of child and adolescent mental health research.

The episode brings digital innovation into child and adolescent mental health practice, with Dr. Alice Wickersham, Zoe Frith, and Professor Jonny Downs from the CHEMS Digital Lab at King's College London.

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If you want the practical side of digital innovation in child and adolescent mental health, start here.

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