LOHA HEALTH LTD

NHS Problem

Children and young people’s mental health services face sustained pressure. NHS England reported that around one in five 8-25-year-olds had a probable mental disorder in 2023. Families may wait for assessment or have long gaps between appointments, while clinicians have limited capacity to support change at home. Parents and carers are a major protective influence. LOHA helps services extend support beyond appointments through structured, evidence-informed activities that enable families to start difficult conversations, strengthen relationships and practise emotional wellbeing skills together.  

Founder Story

LOHA was founded by Professor Alison Metcalfe after more than 30 years working as a clinician and academic with families. Her work showed the importance of parent-young person relationships and family communication for emotional wellbeing, but face-to-face workshops could only reach limited numbers. During a sabbatical caring for her seriously ill mother, Alison developed the idea of using digital technology to make this approach available to more families. She left academia to build LOHA, which was co-designed with families. Alison has worked in and alongside the NHS, although she is not currently NHS staff. 

The Solution

LOHA is a digital health platform for young people aged 10-18 and their parents or carers. Co-designed with families and informed by systemic family therapy, it uses guided activities and programmes to help families talk about feelings, thoughts and behaviours, strengthen trust and develop practical emotional wellbeing skills. LOHA can sit alongside individual clinical support or group programmes across CAMHS, healthy weight and long-term condition pathways. It extends support into everyday family life, helping families prepare for appointments, reinforce therapeutic conversations between sessions and maintain progress at home. 

Impact

Expected impacts: increased family engagement and appointment readiness; greater parent/carer confidence; earlier identification of barriers; and better maintenance of change between appointments. For services, LOHA is intended to extend support without a matching increase in staff time and may help reduce avoidable additional appointments, DNAs/disengagement and escalation to specialist psychology. 

LOHA is currently being evaluated with Sheffield Children’s Hospital’s Complications of Excess Weight service. It is embedded within an eight-week parent/carer group programme and is also available for individual use. The evaluation aims to reach at least 40 families and is measuring family outcomes alongside engagement, DNAs, additional appointments, escalation, waiting-list impact and staff time. Health economic modelling is being undertaken with York Health Economics Consortium. Early staff feedback is positive, but formal outcome data are not yet available, so these service impacts remain expected rather than proven.