FREED receives scaling-up support from The Health Foundation

October 2016

After the successful phase-one evaluation of FREED, the FREED team have secured funding to scale-up FREED to three new partner sites in the UK.

The Health Foundation’s Scaling Up Improvement programme supports teams to take successful health care interventions or approaches and deliver them at scale, to improve health care in the UK.

FREED-UP: First episode and rapid early intervention service for young people with eating disorders – upscaled will see FREED continue at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM), where it was developed and initially evaluated. In addition, FREED will be introduced to three new eating disorder services: Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, and North East London NHS Foundation Trust.

"This project aims to demonstrate the scalability of FREED. The main objectives are to reduce waiting times for treatment and the duration of untreated eating disorders, improve treatment engagement and clinical outcomes, and demonstrate cost effectiveness."

Danielle Glennon, Specialist Clinical Service Lead and FREED-Up project lead

The scaling-up project will run over 2 years and will make FREED available to a population of 6.2 million people from urban, semi-urban and rural areas. In addition, for the first time, FREED will be available to 16-18 year-olds as well as those aged 18-25 years.

Danielle Glennon, Specialist Clinical Service Lead and FREED-Up project lead, says:

“This project aims to demonstrate the scalability of the FREED approach by implementing it across four specialist eating disorder services in Greater London and Yorkshire. The main objectives are to reduce waiting times for treatment and the duration of untreated eating disorders, improve treatment engagement and clinical outcomes, and demonstrate cost effectiveness. “

Each partner organisation will have a FREED champion who will locally lead implementation and dissemination of the approach. Success will be assessed through case-control comparisons with patients treated before the introduction of FREED, a one-year outcome evaluation, and qualitative interviews with patients, carers, clinicians and commissioners.
The evidence obtained will be used to promote FREED as a national service delivery model that empowers patients and families to engage with treatment, promotes recovery and reduces future service utilisation.

FREED receives scaling-up support from The Health Foundation

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