The FREED Network consists of all services using FREED – First Episode Rapid Early Intervention for Eating Disorders. The Network is coordinated by the FREED team at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust Eating Disorder Service. However, collaboration and cross-site learning is encouraged across all services in the Network and the Maudsley team welcomes feedback and input from other services.
Register with FREED to access the professional training platform and toolkit – an online training package and implementation toolkit for services interested in adopting FREED. This material is free for NHS professionals but requires registration to access.
The Maudsley team provides training in FREED for all services joining the Network. This training is currently free for NHS services. Subsequently, learning events are arranged 1-2 times per year. These allow services in the Network to meet and collaborate and to hear of developments and outcomes across the FREED Network and in the field of early intervention for eating disorders.
Services involved in the FREED Network share a core set of de-identified data, including waiting times for treatment and basic clinical outcomes, on a quarterly basis. This information is reported as anonymous, pooled data for the FREED Network as a whole but each service also receives a summary of their local outcomes. Research collaboration is very welcome when services are interested in this.
Join FREED Community to chat, share best practice and inspire hope!
We’re excited to launch this new platform offering a space for collaboration, sharing insights, and discussing best practices. This community of professionals includes both UK-based and international colleagues, all working together to strengthen the FREED model and improve care for those with eating disorders.
FREED was developed by South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London.
In 2020 the FREED model was selected by the Academic Health Science Network as a national programme for spread and adoption due to the evidence for its effectiveness and scalability.
The programme ran until March 2023 and was successful in achieving:
The video below provides a further look at the FREED story.
The following services and trusts are part of the FREED network:
Avon And Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust (AWP)
STEPS Eating Disorders Service
Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust (BEH)
St. Ann's Eating Disorder Service
Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (BHFT)
Berkshire Eating Disorders Service
Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (BSMHFT)
Eating Disorders Service
Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
All Age Eating Disorders Service
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT)
Cambridge Community Adult Eating Disorders Service
Norfolk Community Eating Disorder Service (NCEDS)
Great Yarmouth & Waveney Community Eating Disorders Service
Central And North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL)
Vincent Square Eating Disorder Service
International Partners
FREED Canada (FREEDcan, www.freedcan.ca is being delivered by publicly-funded community teams across Canada. These teams are based in eating disorder programs that partner with mental health and addiction services, primary and community care, and campus health. The FREEDcan website includes Canadian FREED resources, including some French language resources.
Our goal is to help all NHS eating disorder services adopt FREED. If your service is interested, please contact Dannie and Jess, network leads, on freed@slam.nhs.uk. You may also want to download our quiz to see how ‘FREED Ready’ you are.
We are also interested in helping services outside of the UK adopt FREED. Again, if you are interested, please get in touch Dannie and Jess, network leads, on freed@slam.nhs.uk.
If you would like to share your experiences of having an eating disorder or receiving eating disorder treatment, or of caring for someone with an eating disorder, we would love to hear from you too. We continually evaluate what we do based on feedback from service users and the community.
An online training package and implementation toolkit for services interested in adopting FREED. This material is free for NHS professionals but requires registration to access.
Free to use and share with no registration required
Helpful guides for healthcare professionals
Inspiring stories for healthcare professionals
Free to use and share with no registration required
Helpful guides to share with patients and carers
Inspiring stories to share with patients and carers
Part of what makes FREED special is that it is an evidence-based intervention. It was developed out of evidence and research, and it has been thoroughly evaluated so that we know it works.
This makes it really important that we continue to evaluate the effectiveness of FREED in different settings and for different patient groups. We ask all teams in the FREED Network to gather the same core strands of data and provide these to us so that we can build a national data set. This means that we can:
Further evaluate the effectiveness of FREED as a model of early intervention for eating disorders.
Help each partner site in the FREED Network to monitor the effectiveness of FREED in their service.
Better understand cost and cost-effectiveness of implementing FREED in UK services.
We welcome research collaboration from different groups and members of the FREED Network are also involved in other national and international research projects for eating disorders.
Help & Support
The sooner you seek support, the sooner things can start to get better. We can help you find the right option for you.
Don’t want to use the tool? Download our guide to seeking help and support for more general information and advice.
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