Theme lead: Anke Ehlers

One in five adults suffer from mental health problems that interfere with their social and occupational functioning and increase the risk of premature death. There have been major advances in the development of effective psychological treatments. However, limited therapist availability, geographical constraints, and patients’ schedules mean that only a small proportion of patients currently benefit from these treatments.

The Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust and Oxford University partnership is one of the most powerful collaborations in psychological therapy innovation for mental health problems worldwide.

We have made fundamental contributions to the understanding of anxiety disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, recurrent depression, sleep disorders, psychosis, chronic fatigue and medically unexplained symptoms, and have developed leading treatments for these conditions.

What are our aims?

• To capitalise on the digital revolution.
• Further refine psychological treatments.
• Develop delivery systems that vastly increase their scope for treating mental health problems.

How will we achieve this?

• Build a digital platform for delivering psychological therapies via the internet.
• Develop and pilot novel internet implementations of a range of psychological therapies that have been shown to be effective when delivered as face-to-face interventions.
• Conduct randomised controlled trials of the new treatments, identify mediators and moderators of treatment response using the large databases and to further enhance the effectiveness of the treatments by refining their content.
• Develop internet-based therapist training to support dissemination of the programmes.
• Roll out the internet-delivered therapies in the NHS and evaluate their effectiveness in routine clinical care.
• Use the results to further refine the treatments.