Professor Caroline Donovan is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor within the School of Applied Psychology and the Centre for Mental Health at Griffith University. She has received over $12 million worth of funding throughout her career and has published 14 book chapters and 118 peer reviewed journal articles. Her research philosophy centres around a strong belief in early intervention, with research interests centering around child and youth sleep and anxiety problems. Professor Donovan’s research has a strong emphasis on innovative mental health interventions to increase reach and access to evidence-based psychological interventions for young people.

More than 40% of children presenting to public hospital paediatric facilities have sleep problems that lead and contribute to a vast array of psychological, physical, cognitive, academic, and social difficulties. Yet, these facilities do not treat child sleep problems, and there are very few professionals equipped to treat paediatric sleep problems elsewhere. With Australian Rotary Health funding, our team has developed and tested the Lights Out program, a parent-directed intervention targeting child sleep problems, that has been shown to improve child sleep, anxiety, and behaviour problems in face-to-face, videoconference and web-based formats. The next step is to get Lights Out ‘out there’ in the community. This study responds to an urgent request from Queensland’s two largest public hospital paediatric community outpatient clinics to modify our evidence-based Lights Out program into a format that is fit-for-purpose for delivery through their services. The project aims to:

• codesign delivery of the Lights Out Group Videoconference (LOGV) program with hospital administrators, clinicians and parents
• evaluate LOGV in terms of a) improvements in child sleep, anxiety, behaviour problems and quality of life; b) parent mental health, self-efficacy and sleep and; c) implementation and sustainability potential

Co-investigators: Professor Sonja March, Professor Lara Farrell, Professor Allison Waters, Dr Evren Etel, Professor Robert Ware, A/Professor Jasneek Chawla and Dr Sara Winter.