Monday, 30 March 2020

The Children’s e-Hospital is delighted to announce the launch of its latest online service – Comprehensive Behaviour Intervention for Tics (CBiT).

The CBiT service, which is recommended as a first line intervention for tics*, is made up of six strategic therapeutic components to teach children coping strategies to manage their condition. Although not a cure, it has been proven to help reduce the number, severity and impact to benefit a child’s daily wellbeing.

Sarah Sharp, The Children’s e-Hospital’s behaviour therapist, said:
“The success of CBiT comes from a combination of therapies used within treatment. These consist of psychoeducation, self-awareness training, relaxation training, establishing a tic hierarchy, selecting a target tic and reverse engineering it to formulate a competing response to the target tic using habit reversal techniques, and social support.”

The main component of CBiT is Habit Reversal Therapy (HRT) which treats tics individually unlike other behavioural therapies. With our e-Hospital expert, children will work on becoming more aware of how a certain tic is expressed and eventually learn to take control of it.

A second method is called Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) where the main aim is to help children learn how to tolerate the urge that comes before a tic. By learning to manage the urge, children will learn how to suppress their tic.

Sarah continues:
“By exposing tics, children can practice resisting the urge for longer and longer periods of time, until they can stop it in most situations.”

The Children’s e-Hospital will be offering CBiT Therapy in a block of 10 weekly sessions. Some patients will require fewer, or more sessions but this will depend on the individual and their response to treatment.

The Children’s e-Hospital online CBiT service can be booked using the 24/7 online booking service. If you have any questions related to the service, please email our therapist, Sarah Sharp on CBIT@e-hospital.co.uk.

The CQC ‘outstanding’ regulated Children’s e-Hospital is the first and only online specialist paediatric service anywhere in the world which allows parents to speak to expert paediatric consultants from the comfort of their own home.

* American Association of Neurology

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Clearsilver Brand Marketing by emailing victoria.sowerby@clearsilver.co.uk

Notes to editors

The Children’s e-Hospital

Dr Tim Ubhi founded The Children's e-Hospital in 2015 as an innovative way to improve child health delivery in the UK. The Children’s e-Hospital is the first and only online specialist paediatric service anywhere in the world. Since launching, The Children's e-Hospital has become a CQC regulated service that allows parents and carers to speak to expert paediatric consultants and dieticians from the comfort of their own home.

Dr Tim Ubhi

• Dr Tim Ubhi is a consultant paediatrician and fellow of the Royal College of Paediatrics & Child Health. He has over 22 years’ experience in paediatrics & child health.
• The early part of his career was as a lecturer in paediatrics & child health at Leeds University. During this time, he completed his research into using botulinum toxin to help children with cerebral palsy to walk. For this piece of work Tim was awarded the prestigious Michael Blacow prize by the Royal College of Paediatrics & Child Health. Tim was then awarded a medical research council training fellowship looking at the development of novel treatments for children’s cancers.
• As a consultant and clinical director in the Yorkshire region he noted the improvements in patient care that were necessary in order for paediatrics and childcare to survive as part of a National Health Service. Tim has completed the NHS leadership academy Nye Bevan executive training programme and graduated in March 2016.
• In 2016 Dr Tim spent a year travelling back and forth to Greece to help refugees escaping Syria. A short news documentary can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFbGmGusGCE
• Currently, Dr Tim is working with clinical commissioning groups and acute trusts in the UK to bring The Children’s e-Hospital model into the NHS.
• Dr Tim is an expert in PANDAS (Paediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections) often misdiagnosed as Autism or mental illness.