October 14, 2026
We are delighted to announce that our AnDY Research Clinic has been shortlisted for the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health‘s Lionel Hersov award.
This award recognises practice teams that demonstrate how evidence from research, audit or service evaluation can be used to improve clinical practice, as well as practice teams that evaluate clinical impact or make meaningful improvements to the quality and efficiency of services.
We are very proud therefore to have reached the shortlist since this acknowledges the work carried out by the AnDY team to bring research and clinical practice together. The AnDY Research Clinics in Oxford and Reading provide specialist assessment and intervention for children and young people with mental health difficulties, while also creating opportunities to evaluate and improve the way those services are delivered. This approach has produced consistently strong clinical outcomes. Across the two clinics, more than 500 referrals are accepted each year and around 90% of young people complete treatment. In the first full year of the Oxford clinic, 86% of young people completed treatment, 78% showed improvements in symptoms or functioning, 87% made meaningful progress towards their treatment goals and 53% moved from above to below clinical thresholds for their difficulties.
The clinics also provide a research-ready infrastructure for studies led by researchers across the wider child and adolescent mental health research community. The Reading and Oxford clinics currently support twelve active research studies, including clinical trials, feasibility studies, qualitative and observational research. Embedding this research within routine care creates opportunities for families to contribute to research while receiving evidence-based treatment, and helps new findings move more quickly from research into clinical practice.
This aspect of the AnDY model is particularly important to the team. The clinics have supported the research of numerous researchers whose work has contributed to advances in child and adolescent mental health. These include several colleagues from Mental Health in Development and the Oxford Centre for Emerging Minds Research who also find themselves shortlisted for other awards from the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, such as Professor Cathy Creswell who has been nominated for a Digital Intervention Award, for clinicians who have put evidence base into practice within the information/data/IT/digital fields of child and adolescent mental health. Another is Dr Eleanor Leigh who co-wrote one of the papers shortlisted for the JCPP Advances Best Paper award. Lottie Shipp is another nominee to have worked within the AnDY clinic, being shortlisted under the Trainee Award as one of the best Phd Students of the year. Their work is only part of a much broader programme of research that the AnDY clinics have helped to facilitate.
More widely across MHID and OCEMR, we’re celebrating nominations for:
We hope that this Lionel Hersov award nomination provides an opportunity to recognise not only the clinical outcomes achieved by the AnDY Research Clinics, but also the wider role of research-active NHS services in creating an environment where research and clinical practice can strengthen one another. By combining evidence-based treatment, routine outcome monitoring, service evaluation and research within routine care, AnDY provides a practical example of how research can become part of everyday NHS clinical practice.