Interdisciplinary and lived experience collaborations to identify cross-cutting needs.
An innovation in the centre is to bring together scientists from child and youth mental health fields to predict how mental illness develops across the lifespan. Because the predictions are meant for young people, involving people with lived experience will also be critical in the centre to identify what predictions are most needed.
Data harmonization within and across research sites.
A current research challenge is that data are often spread across individual studies and sites. Pre-empt will address this limitation by harmonizing datasets from the settings of: prospective birth cohorts, paediatric secondary care clinics, primary mental health care for youth, specialized risk clinics, and secondary adolescent and adult care.
Methods sharing and development.
Personalised methods for psychiatric prediction span statistical cultures, disciplines, and data types. Pre-empt will aim to bring these methods together so that they can be shared by the members of the Centre in order to maximise the benefit to young people within a cross-disciplinary environment of methodological excellence.
Model and algorithm sharing.
Once predictive models or algorithms are created, they will be shared between the projects in Pre-empt in order to validate and improve their performance.
Development of decision support tools, implementation science, and ethics.
A critical step forward is to prepare for the future of personalised care by investigating how statistical models could be introduced to the clinic. Pre-empt will do this by using implementation science approaches and assessing the transparency, appropriate regulation, impact on patient-clinician relationships, and governance of future mental healthcare.
Capacity building through education and student-focussed research.
The future of personalised treatment for youth is in the hands of the young people who are doing the research and the clients who will benefit from the tools. A key component of pre-empt is to provide education and student-focussed research programmes, including the employment of undergraduate and graduate students. We will also work extensively with Youth Advisory Council and the Youth Research Council at Orygen and similar organisations within our Centre.
