Driving uptake and evidence for Daylight, a digital treatment for anxiety
Posted: - 20th November 2025
Living with anxiety can profoundly affect daily life, from work and relationships to the ability to manage everyday tasks. For many people in South Yorkshire, access to timely support has often meant long waits for therapy or reliance on medication alone. That’s why the rollout of Daylight resonated so strongly with patients. Within just six months of working with Health Innovation Yorkshire and Humber, more than 1,000 people had begun using the digital treatment and early feedback shows how transformative it has been.
“It helped me control my anxiety and think about what I could and could not control.”
“Before, I wouldn’t really leave the house on my own. Now I go on walks, run errands, even travel to another city.”
Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) affects up to 8% of patients in primary care and often disrupts their work, relationships and daily life (source: NICE CKS, April 2025). Yet fewer than a third of people with GAD receive adequate treatment and patients face long waits for in-person therapy or reliance on medication with potential side effects.
UK company Big Health developed Daylight, a UKCA-marked self-referral digital treatment for adults with known or suspected GAD. The program can be accessed directly by patients without a prescription or referral and has been shown in randomized controlled trials to effectively treat symptoms of anxiety. The key question was whether Daylight could also deliver cost-effective outcomes for the NHS when offered within primary care services.
In September 2024, Health Innovation Yorkshire and Humber partnered with Big Health and regional stakeholders to roll out Daylight for patients across South Yorkshire. This initiative enabled the region to provide immediate access to an evidence-based treatment that supports both patients and the NHS. It also created an opportunity to generate robust real-world and economic evidence on the acceptability and health system impact of integrating digital psychological treatments early in the care pathway.
Health Innovation Yorkshire and Humber played a pivotal role in bringing the project to life. From the outset, Health Innovation Yorkshire and Humber mobilised regional partners, including Primary Care Sheffield, the South Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (ICB) and the York Health Economics Consortium (YHEC), and created the conditions for rapid implementation and evaluation.
Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber’s expertise helped in the following areas:
- Creating engagement and buy-in from primary care teams building on the strengths of our relationships across the sector
- Facilitating senior stakeholder engagement throughout the ICB driving support with awareness and adoption of the digital treatment
- Co-ordinating effective cross-functional meetings bringing together different organisations and disciplines.
- Support rolling out Daylight across GP practices in the region.
This wraparound support ensured the evaluation was not just a theoretical exercise, but a practical test of how digital mental health tools can be embedded in the NHS.
The project has delivered remarkable early results. Launched in September 2024, it aimed to recruit 1,000 patients over 12 months. With Health Innovation Yorkshire and Humber’s support, that target was exceeded in just six months, and by month nine more than 1,500 patients had enrolled.
For patients, the impact was immediate: all patients received immediate access to treatment with no waiting lists. Early feedback showed 69% of patients were practicing CBT techniques outside of the app, and 80% reporting relief after just one session.
Importantly, the evaluation will also provide NICE with critical evidence on whether the technology is cost saving in the NHS. Preliminary analyses of primary care data showed that patients using Daylight (n=249) had significantly fewer GP visits than matched controls receiving standard anxiety care (n=249; rate ratio = 0.728, p<0.001), equating to 4.8 fewer visits per patient per year. Daylight patients also required significantly fewer GP-issued fit notes for work than controls (rate ratio = 0.619, p=0.024), representing 1 fewer fit note annually per patient. These results were presented at ISPOR Europe in Glasgow this November.
The collaboration is already demonstrating how early access to evidence-based digital tools can relieve pressure on overstretched services while improving outcomes for patients.
While we have good relationships with many of the Health Innovation Networks, we chose to work with Yorkshire and Humber because of their exceptional stakeholder networks in the local health and care system.
Their ability to activate partnerships and support us in reaching frontline clinicians was critical to the success and this wraparound service is vital for the adoption of all innovation in the NHS, without which it often fails.
What shines through is Yorkshire and Humber’s ability to navigate and mobilise teams to action, leading to the rapid uptake of innovative new treatments. In this instance, it meant helping over 1500 patients to access evidence-based treatment far ahead of schedule, with early evidence suggesting it will have had significant cost savings for the local health service.
Innovation alone is not enough. Without the right partnerships and engagement, even the most effective solutions can fail to take root in the NHS. Our ability to convene stakeholders, mobilise primary care teams and capture real-world insights has been central to the success of this project. By ensuring rapid recruitment and meaningful adoption, we’ve helped demonstrate that Daylight can be delivered effectively in everyday NHS practice. This is a crucial step for digital therapeutics in the UK: moving from promising evidence to widespread adoption.
