20/01/25
We take time to celebrate a year of hard work – and prizes
This has been a busy and bright year for the CAMHS Digital Lab. While prizes aren’t the purpose of our work, it is refreshing to have an opportunity to pause and celebrate the impact of the work that our colleagues do. We’ve already acknowledged a couple of our successes in our other news stories - myHealthE winning HealthTech Innovation of the Year at the DL100 awards from Digital Leaders, and Dr. Alice Wickersham’s Commendation from the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Sciences. But we wanted to take this moment to celebrate the other wins from this year.
On 29 November, Sarjhana Ragunathan Brindha won a Hidden REF award for her work developing the myHealthE platform, which you can read more about here. The work it takes to build secure health data systems – which is vital to our service provision and our research – isn’t as often recognised by traditional academic awards schemes, so we’re delighted the Hidden REF scheme has brought Sarjhana's work front and centre.
Further back in November, we were thrilled to see Dr. Asilay Seker - who is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Trainee as well as a PhD student with the Lab – win Research Trainee of the Year at the ACAMH Awards. This was in recognition of her robust and diverse contributions to clinical, research, and editorial practices, with specialties including researching psychiatry trainees’ experiences and supporting neurodiverse children. Our Academic Lead Dr. Alice Wickersham was shortlisted at this awards ceremony for Postgraduate Research Trainee of the Year.
Speaking of which, we will take every opportunity to embarrass Alice, who has gained not one but TWO recognitions in the past month. Her work looking at discrepancies in ethnicity recordings across the Clinical Record Interactive Search and the National Pupil Database won second prize at the NIHR Maudsley BRC CEDI awards, where the PACES team were also shortlisted for their work building a framework to remotely co-design products with neurodiverse children. Alice also received a Commendation at the ONS Research Excellence Awards for the work completed as part of her ADR UK Fellowship, where she analysed linked data from the Department for Education and the Ministry of Justice.
We also saw Lab work recognised in shortlists; both myHealthE and the Lab were shortlisted at the HSJ Digital Awards earlier this year, and the Lab was shortlisted for Digital Mental Health Team at the RCPsych Awards. Our Research Officer Will Bennett was shortlisted at the King’s Research Support awards, in recognition of his work with schools, clinical teams, and the Lab which is critical to our research being completed. Like Sarjhana’s Hidden REF award, we were delighted to see Will’s work – without which our research wouldn’t happen – be put into the spotlight. Will is also a key contributor to the Maudsley Education Consultation Service (MECS), which was shortlisted at the King’s Engaged Research Network Awards.
Well, that was it for 2024. We’re grateful to work with such a talented and dedicated team, who are passionate about improving young people’s mental health – and supporting each other.