Health Equity Innovation Challenge 2022
Children and Young People's Mental Health - Anxiety
Overview
Identifying and spreading innovative practice to help close health equity gaps for Children and Young People’s Mental Health.
Our 2022 Health Equity Innovation Challenge is focused on identifying and spreading innovative practice to help close health equity gaps for Children and Young People’s Mental Health in access to care, quality of care, opportunities for a healthy life and agency in managing individual health. The theme of this year’s challenge is anxiety.
Forming a key component of our Regional Health Equity Programme, the Challenge initially offered up to three ambitious innovators grants of up to £25K, over a six-month period, to fund their proposed solution and will provide real-world evaluation support to help innovators to generate the evidence needed to bring their innovation to market.
Due to the strength of the applications, this funding was extended to support six innovations in total, with funding combined from the UK Office for Life Sciences and the South West AHSN’s Regional Health Equity Programme Fund.
The successful applicants are:
Digital innovations
- BFB Labs: a game-based digital therapeutic intervention for children aged 7-12 years, from lower socio-economic rural and coastal areas, designed to improve self-management and reduce anxiety.
- Good With Limited: CBT-informed digital financial wellbeing support app for young people who are experiencing sub-clinical anxiety.
- TellMi & NHS Somerset: a digital peer-support service being tested and evaluated for scale up by NHS Somerset, targeting 11-25 year olds from rural areas and lower socio-economic groups.
Nature-based innovations
- The Wave Project: a surfing and stand-up paddle-boarding intervention, designed to reduce anxiety amongst 8–18-year-olds experiencing health inequity.
- The Apricot Centre: food and mood work, and sensory integration in nature, designed to reduce anxiety amongst looked after children/care leavers aged 7-13 years.
- Resilient Young Minds, NHS Devon: therapeutic nature-based groups to reduce anxiety amongst young people aged 18-25 years experiencing health inequity.
“The panel were absolutely blown away by the strength of the applications submitted to this year’s Challenge, and the ways in which the initiatives put forwarded responded to the issue of inequity across Children and Young People’s Mental Health, Anxiety. To be able to support not just three, but six, innovators to expand their projects across the South West region is a pleasure and we are really excited to see the impact that these projects will have across the lives of Children and Young People in Devon, Cornwall and Somerset.”
Rosie Graham
South West AHSN Programme Manager and organiser of the Challenge Fund
Why anxiety?
Anxiety disorders in children and young people bring significant personal and societal costs and living with anxiety reduces life chances for children and young people.
These challenges associated with anxiety are disproportionately experienced by children living in poverty, children who have complex needs and children who face other risks of exclusion, alienation, and marginalisation.
The Health Equity Innovation Challenge
The Health Equity Innovation Challenge was developed as part of our second Regional Health Equity Programme, which identified mental health and equity for young people as being a key priority for the South West.
It is delivered by the South West AHSN’s Innovation Exchange, which is designed to help innovators implement solutions to meet the challenges faced by the health and care system in South West England.
The Challenge supports the South West AHSN’s purpose to transform lives through the adoption and spread of innovation in health and care, to improve population health and generate economic growth as part of the national AHSN Network.
The 2022 Health Equity Innovation Challenge is the second challenge run by the South West AHSN.
We will be reporting in Summer 2023 on the activities undertaken by this year’s successful Challenge applicants, and the impact and learning from them across the South West.
Please keep an eye out on this webpage and follow us on social media or contact innovation@swahsn.com for more information.
