Senior Research Associate, NIHR Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care

Emma Howarth is a Senior Research Associate for the Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research Care in the East of England (EoE CLAHRC). Her research focuses on developing and evaluating interventions and services to improve children’s mental health outcomes. She has a particular interest in early intervention that targets ‘high risk’ groups, with specific expertise regarding children’s exposure to hostile, coercive and violent family environments.

Emma is co-lead of the Child and young people’s mental health services research group. She has recently lead a study to identify priorities for the delivery of community based child and adolescent mental health services in the East of England, which is being used to inform regional commissioning decisions. She is currently leading a mixed methods case study evaluation of the implementation of CYP-IAPT in Cambridgeshire, and a mixed method feasibility study of systematic methods to identify mental health problems in Primary schools.

Recently Emma has been working as part of a collaboration with Canadian colleagues on the VEGA Project, which is developing pan-Canadian public health guidance, protocols, curricula and tools for health and social service providers to respond to family violence. Some of this work builds on an evidence synthesis lead by Emma to review the effectiveness and acceptability of interventions for children who have experienced domestic violence and abuse; the recommendations from which are being used to guide development of the evidence base in the UK and beyond.

Emma is particularly committed to working with members of the public, service users and those delivering and commissioning services to identify and undertake pragmatic research that is directly relevant to practice.