There are a number of best practices that I would really like to highlight. The first is that we need to educate pediatricians, family physicians, and those on the ground running who see young people, young children, adolescents, and women to identify these illnesses as soon as possible.
Part of good practice in the primary care setting is to make sure that you screen for these illnesses, and for children and adolescents, to make sure that pediatricians and family physicians alike are keeping growth curves so that they can identify young people when they fall off those growth curves. I would say that is a best practice.
The other thing I would add to what April said is that family-based therapy is really the first-line therapy for adolescents and children with eating disorders. This is an out-patient therapy. Although we have in-patient wards, and we need in-patient wards for the sickest of the sick, the goal would be to admit kids, get them medically stable, and then discharge them from hospital as soon as we possibly can and begin to engage them in the only evidence-based treatment we have, and that is the Maudsley or family-based therapy.
We know that these treatments are good, and I say “good” because they're not excellent. They're good. We know that 75% of young people recover using this treatment, but there is 25% of young people who do not recover as a result of this kind of treatment and need something more and different.