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Watch Me Play!: protocol for a feasibility study of a remotely delivered intervention to promote mental health resilience for children (ages 0-8) across UK early years and children's services

Randell, Elizabeth; Nollett, Claire; Henley, Josie; Smallman, Kim; Johnson, Sean; Meister, Lena; McNamara, Rachel; ... Kennedy, Eilis; + view all (2024) Watch Me Play!: protocol for a feasibility study of a remotely delivered intervention to promote mental health resilience for children (ages 0-8) across UK early years and children's services. Pilot and Feasibility Studies , 10 (1) , Article 55. 10.1186/s40814-024-01491-7. Green open access

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Abstract

BACKGROUND: Half of mental health problems are established by the age of 14 years and 75% by 24 years. Early intervention and prevention of mental ill health are therefore vitally important. However, increased demand over recent years has meant that access to child mental health services is often restricted to those in severest need. Watch Me Play! (WMP) is an early intervention designed to support caregiver attunement and attention to the child to promote social-emotional well-being and thereby mental health resilience. Originally developed in the context of a local authority mental health service for children in care, it is now also delivered online as a low intensity, scalable, preventative intervention. Although WMP shows promise and is already used in some services, we do not yet know whether it is effective. METHODS: A non-randomised single group feasibility study with embedded process evaluation. We propose to recruit up to 40 parents/carers of children aged 0-8 years who have been referred to early years and children's services in the UK. WMP involves a parent watching the child play and talking to their child about their play (or for babies, observing and following signals) for up to 20 min per session. Some sessions are facilitated by a trained practitioner who provides prompts where necessary, gives feedback, and discusses the child's play with the caregiver. Services will offer five facilitated sessions, and parents will be asked to do at least 10 additional sessions on their own with their child in a 5-week period. Feasibility outcomes examined are as follows: (i) recruitment, (ii) retention, (iii) adherence, (iv) fidelity of delivery, (v) barriers and facilitators of participation, (vi) intervention acceptability, (vii) description of usual care, and (viii) data collection procedures. Intervention mechanisms will be examined through qualitative interview data. Economic evaluation will be conducted estimating cost of the intervention and cost of service use for child and parents/carers quality-adjusted life years. DISCUSSION: This study will address feasibility questions associated with progression to a future randomised trial of WMP. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN13644899 . Registered on 14th April 2023.

Type: Article
Title: Watch Me Play!: protocol for a feasibility study of a remotely delivered intervention to promote mental health resilience for children (ages 0-8) across UK early years and children's services
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1186/s40814-024-01491-7
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40814-024-01491-7
Language: English
Additional information: Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
Keywords: Child development, Communication, Parent–child interaction
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Division of Psychiatry
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Division of Psychiatry > Epidemiology and Applied Clinical Research
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10190574
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