This appeared last week for Mental Health Week.
Digital tech: making mental health care fit for purpose
Authored by Cate Swannell
EXISTING mental health care services in Australia are “not going to cut it in the 21st century” but health information technologies offer a way forward that’s fit for purpose, according to one of the co-designers of an innovative new online platform.
Professor Ian Hickie, co-Director, Health and Policy of the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre, told InSight+ in an exclusive podcast that Project Synergy, an online platform designed “to test the potential of new and emerging technologies to enhance the quality of mental health care provided by traditional face-to-face services”, was an extension of what had been happening in youth mental health over the past decade.
“We are still using 20th century approaches to a 21st century problem,” Professor Hickie said.
“We’re still trying to build clinics and offices and services through GPs, through psychologists, through psychiatrists, through peer workers, through lay workers to try and meet this tremendous unmet need for services — quality service, not just any service.
“Many, many people have serious problems with suicidality, substance abuse, emerging major mental illness, who need real care, ongoing quality care, and cannot have that need met by current services or the way that we’re trying to currently grow those services through traditional profession-based clinics,” he said.
In a Supplement published by the MJA, Professor Hickie and his colleagues described four trials of Project Synergy conducted in different populations of young people (i) attending university; (ii) in three disadvantaged communities in New South Wales; (iii) at risk of suicide; and (iv) attending five headspace centres.
“People can put in their information. They can track their progress. They can participate. They can have choices,” Professor Hickie told InSight+.
“Not all clinical services are up to that. Many clinical services are very top down. The funny thing is, people say that people won’t provide information.
“You bet they will if it’s about themselves getting a better service. In fact, they are dying to tell services, ‘I have many needs, not just one’.
“[Project Synergy] allows those needs to be expressed, essentially to say to services: ‘You need to get your act together either within your own service or in partnership with other services to meet these needs’.
“It’s very challenging to the service environment to go down this road. You’re not just dealing with a passive user of services. You’re suddenly dealing with an empowered and articulate user of services, saying: ‘Hey, I’ve got a bunch of needs. I have a mental health problem, a substance abuse problem, an employment problem. Can you help? I’ve got a physical health problem to boot. Can you help with this range of problems? Can we agree what I do, what you do, who else needs to be involved to start to deal with these issues?’”
Project Synergy sprang from a background of what was already happening in the youth mental health area over the past decade, Professor Hickie told InSight+.
“The Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre set up by Professor Jane Burns and colleagues at the University of Melbourne and here in the University of Sydney was working on youth mental health developments in web-based services for young people for suicide prevention and mental health.
“[From that] there was a realisation by first the Abbott government and then the Turnbull government that the implications were far greater than just youth mental health.
“There is the potential to overcome issues related to quality service provision for veterans, for people living in rural and regional Australia, for children, for adults, for all people.
“That led to an investment by the Turnbull government out of the 2016 election in developing this platform further and testing this platform further in a variety of different settings – continuing the work in youth mental health but actually extending way beyond that.”
Professor Hickie told InSight+ that the perception that only young people used digital technologies was a fallacy.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said.
There is a lot more here and there is a 25 minute podcast linked in the text.
All I can say this is pretty hopeful stuff that I hope gets continuing support as we get better at it.
David.
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