Eating Disorders HIT highlights for 2018-19

Helen Malson and Sanni Norweg, Directors of the Eating Disorders Health Integration Team (EDHIT), reflect on the team’s work and achievements over the last year.

In February our patient and public involvement (PPI) group mounted an exhibition of photography at the Watershed, featuring work by people with personal experience of eating disorders. The event also covered the launch FREED, the local eating disorder service’s new early intervention service model developed by the Maudsley. As well as viewing the exhibition, the 50 or so attendees had the chance to meet EDHIT members and talk about current activities, services and research developments.

The adult eating disorder service STEPS will be one of the sites nationally adopting FREED, partly funded by NHS Innovation. We are hoping to make this model work for our young people transitioning from CAMHS as well. We are also exploring how best to link this to our work on early interventions, primary care and transitions.

We are involved in a project investigating experiences of primary care services for people with an eating disorder and two projects developing eating disorders prevention. Our regular PPI engagement evenings are a great opportunity to discuss these projects and explore ideas for future work on issues that are important to people with lived experience.

Over the next three years, we plan to develop an app and one stop website for people with lived experience of an eating disorder, carers and health care professionals. We will work Dr Knut Schroeder, who, with STITCH, has produced an app to help people who self-harm. Getting the perspectives and ideas of people with lived experience will be key to this project’s success.

Our research work stream’s regular half-day conference series at the University of Bristol Psychology Department includes brief presentations on local and national priorities, research activities and service developments. We held one in September 2018 that was attended by around 50 people, a mix of students, researchers, commissioners, health care practitioners and people with lived experience. It was a really good opportunity for a wide audience to hear about eating disorders research.

In our transitions work stream, we have mapped out service pathways between young people and adult services. We identified ways for services to work together more seamlessly: adult (STEPs) and adolescent (CAMHS) services are now adapting their care pathways to promote this. The UK-wide training in eating disorders for CAMHS teams has also been attended by STEPs, who in turn have provided training to CAMHS. This increased collaboration has inspired future research.

EDHIT is co-directed by Sanni Norweg, Consultant Clinical Psychologist at STEPs, and Helen Malson, Associate Professor in Social Psychology at UWE. Katie Legge leads our PPI workstream and our research work stream is led by Peter Rogers, Professor of Biological Psychology at University of Bristol. and Rosie Oldham-Cooper, Clinical Psychologist, STEPS. This year we also welcomed Ann Taylor and Monica Potter from CAMHS, Jade Southron (PPI) and Phoebe Kalungi from Bristol City Council to the management group. We look forward to another successful year.