On 7 May 2026, the Child and Adolescent Intellectual Disability Psychiatry Network (CAIDPN) will hold its annual conference, From Research to Practice: Advancing Early Intervention, Treatments and Services for Children and Young People with Intellectual Disabilities. CAIDPN is a special interest group within ACAMH.
Taking place in person at King’s College London, the conference brings together leading researchers, clinicians and practitioners from across disciplines. We spoke to Dr. Ashley Liew, Consultant Paediatric Neuropsychiatrist at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and Vice-Chair of CAIDPN – about the day, the field, and what delegates can expect.
Who is this conference for?
The short answer is anyone working with or interested in the mental health of children and young people with intellectual disabilities, whatever their discipline, including researchers. While CAIDPN is primarily a network of psychiatrists, the conference is genuinely multidisciplinary, and the speaker profiles reflect that.
We’ve made a deliberate decision to hold the conference in person only. There’s a place for online events, but meeting in-person is also really important. One of the wonderful things about working in this space is that we have a fairly small, close-knit professional community. Networking, chatting, and making new connections is really valuable not just for us professionally but also for how we then support young people and families.
What are you most looking forward to on the day?
A major thing is catching up with the community. This is a passionate professional community, a lot of people working in this field have some kind of personal connection to intellectual disability, like a sibling they grew up with, and that shared passion and energy is something I really appreciate when we get together.
I’m also really excited about the programme we’ve put together. Everyone on our wish list of speakers said ‘yes’ first time, which doesn’t always happen, so we’ve got a really strong day. As well as some amazing examples of real-world practice, we’ve got world-leading researchers in their field – and we’ve deliberately structured the two morning sessions so there is an academic session highlighting research evidence, followed by a practice session on that same topic.
One of the academic speakers, Professor Richard Hastings, will be presenting some early findings from a major NIHR study on services for children with learning disability (LD) and behaviours that challenge (BtC).
The final sessions are focused on ARFID – why did you decide to ensure this was highlighted?
When putting together the programme, we asked the community what they wanted, and Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) was high on the list as something colleagues flagged as a priority. ARFID, is a condition where the child avoids certain foods or has limited food intake, because of developmental issues (like sensory differences), or mental health issues (like a fear of choking or vomiting), rather than body image or related concerns. Children with intellectual disabilities are particularly likely to be affected.
ARFID is a good example of an area where the clinical need is clear and practitioners are already developing innovative responses, which we hope to discuss further on the day.
What do you hope people will actually take away from the day?
This will clearly be different for different people, but we hope to have a broad offering which will appeal to a wide range of learning aims. For those who are motivated by being at the frontier of the research, our academic focused talks will cover research which has just been completed or about to complete. The practice sessions are specifically designed so that you can apply knowledge in clinical practice straight away.
Why is this an exciting time to be working in this field?
Compared to 10 or 20 years ago, I think the field is gaining the recognition it deserves. It’s not that long ago that specialist services for children with intellectual disabilities were few and far between, largely driven by local champions rather than any systematic commissioning approach. The provision of those services has really improved, and research funders who perhaps in the past weren’t sure what intellectual disability meant in clinical terms have become much more engaged, but we know that things still have to improve in the face of inequitable provision and few focused research grants.
Part of what’s driven that, I think, is the broader shift in awareness of neurodevelopmental conditions – autism in particular has become much better understood publicly, and that’s created momentum for the field more widely. But there are still significant gaps. The evidence base for treatments and interventions is thinner than it should be – clinicians are doing excellent work, but often having to adapt standard approaches for a population that is minimally verbal or has significant cognitive differences, and those adaptations aren’t always formally evaluated. That’s one of the things we’re hoping this conference contributes to changing.
If you imagine a CAIDPN conference ten years from now, what do you hope will look different?
I hope the things we’re presenting as innovations in 2026 will no longer be innovations. Early intervention, which is one of our main themes for the conference, is a good example – the aspiration is that it stops being a conference theme and becomes standard, universal practice. Then the conference in 2036 can be talking about refining approaches that are already embedded, rather than just the importance of it.
On services, I hope we’ll see meaningful reform in the next few years and that means services genuinely shaped around the needs of the children and families they serve. And on treatments and interventions, I’d hope that what’s currently being presented as promising early-stage work will become a robust suite of properly evidenced options in the years to come. Those are the ambitions, and I think the direction of travel feels right.
Find more content on intellectual disabilities, and on the conditions that often co-occur, on ACAMH Learn, our completely free, online learning resource.
