Our work

The Well Centre Charity is working in partnership with practitioners, young people, funders and policy makers to spread and scale an innovative and holistic new service model that will improve health services for young people. You can find out more about our current projects on this page.

Spread and scale

The Well Centre Charity was successful in winning bids from the National Lottery Community Fund and Maudsley Building Brighter Future Funds to Spread and Scale the model across the four boroughs in South East London (Lambeth, Southwark, Croydon and Lewisham) and across three regions nationally.

To deliver this work, we have partnered with local GP champions in practices across the most deprived areas of the boroughs to embed:

• Adolescent specific GP clinics
• Initial assessment using the ‘Teen Health Check’ – a conversational biopsychosocial assessment tool designed to identify risk upstream
• A Health and Wellbeing practitioner to deliver 8-12 sessions of support, tailored to the young person’s goals

Our in-house research and evaluation team are working to track and evaluate the implementation progress across the pilot sites.

For more about our implementation work programme, please contact info@wellcentrecharity.org.

Research and partnerships

The Well Centre Charity is committed to learning and evidence:

• Tracking the implementation journey: We are tracking the spread and scale of adolescent friendly primary care services across the country, in order to learn about the enabling factors and barriers to implementation.  For this we have established a process to support pilot sites in data collection and evaluation. This includes the capture of key elements of the service in a way that (a) allows comparisons with other sites attempting similar aims, and (b) gives immediate and useful feedback to local interest-holders and commissioners.
• Measuring impact: As part of the Maudsley Building Brighter Futures Fund, the Charity has partnered with King’s College London CAMHS Digital Lab to find out more about the impact of improved services to young people across South London.  This includes quantifying the effect of Well Centre provision on young people’s outcomes using novel primary and secondary care mental health data.
• Digital innovation: Our partnership with the CAMHS Digital Lab is also allowing us to develop and evaluate the use of a new digital health platform – myHealthE – to support the provision of mental health care to adolescents in primary care settings.  The myHealthE system was established within secondary mental health care settings, and the team will co-develop the app with adolescent experts by experience to expand its use in a novel setting.  For more information on myHealthE see the recent blog post by the CAMHS Digital Lab Programme Manager.

The team regularly writes about our work and presents findings at conferences and workshops.  For more about our research and evidence workstreams, please contact info@wellcentrecharity.org.

Outputs from our research and evidence work can be found in Resources.

System change

A significant proportion of young people in the general population have unmet mental health needs.  Many are on waiting lists for services.  This is not just a problem that’s just happening in some more deprived or remote places.  It is everywhere where there are teenagers.  Primary care can be a significant part of the solution to this.

Over the last two years, we’ve seen significant uptake of the WC model; however, we’ve also seen organisations struggling to secure the funding needed to carry out the work. We are keen to draw on the WCC’s unique convening capacity to build system change in order to improve the offer to young people.  This includes bringing together organisations from across the country that are committed to and working on the frontline of adolescent health (our Network), while also building a wider Alliance, including policymakers, commissioners, Royal Colleges, and government, as well as WCC Network members.

Improved healthcare for adolescents requires shared learning across the country, but also significant change to the policy and commissioning environment at national level, and we know that no individual organisation will be able to bring this about alone.

For more information about our system change work, please contact john.poyton@wellcentrecharity.org