2024 ACAMH Award nomination
Work bridging research and practice in child and adolescent mental health has been longlisted for the 2024 ACAMH Awards.
The Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH) has announced the longlist of nominees for their prestigious annual awards – and a collaboration between members of staff from a specialist CAMHS team at Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust and the PRiCE Lab at The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation NHS Trust has been recognised.
This collaboration, led by Dr Philip Archard, who teaches on two of our professional doctorate programmes, has been longlisted for the Lionel Hersov Memorial Award, which recognises “a practice team that has demonstrated the use of evidence base (research, audit or service evaluation) into clinical practice [or] a team that has evaluated the outcome or measures either the clinical impact or demonstrated quality improvement”.
Dr Archard was initially involved in this work while practicing within a specialist CAMHS team at the Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust. Alongside Dr Sewanu Awhangansi from Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust and Dr Michelle O’Reilly from the University of Leicester, he co-led quality improvement activity focused on evaluating the use of video conferencing with young people in CAMHS care, care delivery to children and young people involved with youth justice services, and waiting list support for foster carers and adoptive parents.
Dr Archard then used this experience to develop the PRiCE Lab (Practice Research in Child Welfare) here at The Tavistock and Portman. Based in our Directorate of Education and Training, this “living lab” focuses on practice research at the interface between child and adolescent mental health and child welfare. It involves our Child, community and educational psychology (M4) and Advanced practice and research: social work and social care (D55) course communities, as well as clinical and academic collaborators, and external organisations.
Reflecting on the nomination, Dr Archard said: “It’s just great to have the work we did in Leicester recognised in this way. I learned an awful lot about the importance of practice-relevant research there. And I feel very fortunate to have taken forward learning from that experience in my work on D55 and M4, where we encourage students to undertake research that is close to the concerns of the communities served by health and care professionals.”
The ACAMH Awards 2024 shortlist will be announced in October 2024, with awards presented at a virtual ceremony in November 2024.