Co-design workshop: Youth outcomes in Murrindindi Shire

Co-design workshop: Youth outcomes in Murrindindi Shire

In 2019, Alaya Partners consultant and senior partner, Renee Hayden, was engaged by Murrindindi Shire Council to facilitate a co-design workshop to develop a youth mental health model to improve mental health outcomes for young people in Murrindindi Shire.

Delivered in Yea, a rural community in Victoria, the workshop aimed to brainstorm potential approaches to youth services in the community and surrounds and build collective buy-in from local stakeholders to act the identified opportunities. Twenty five people from 19 organisations, including youth and other services, the high schools and the hospital as well as representatives from Murray PHN, Department of Education and Training, and Department of Health and Human Services participated in the codesign.

Participants completed a pre-workshop questionnaire to inform the co-design outline, ensuring the facilitator touched on known critical issues and resources in the area. Participants were then led through a series of discussion based activities to explore the following topics:

  • Core health and welfare themes and issues impacting young people in Yea / Alexandra and surrounds
  • Known organisations delivering services to young people in the Shire
  • Gaps in services
  • Best practice – youth models for consideration, including a presentation from Live4Life CEO Bernard Gallbally
  • Identifying funding opportunities and community investment / ownership.

Idea generation activities then centred on how to build community engagement and ownership and the key components of a model (such as Live4Life) that would address the needs of area’s young people, with participants identifying three focus areas for the codesign model:

  1. Mental health: Mild – Moderate Support
  2. Sense of belonging/community connection
  3. Physical health (self care knowledge & implementation)).

The immediate workshop outcomes were:

  1. Alaya summarised the codesign findings into a succinct report.
  2. Stakeholders establishing a working party to develop future funding submissions
  3. Agree collective community engagement activities in conjunction with Murrindindi Shire Council.

Talk to us to find out how we can help you get the best out of your workshop.

Image Credit: Bren O’Callaghan via Flickr Creative Commons

The Risky Drinking Project

The Risky Drinking Project

Drinking alcohol in excess, or binge drinking, often goes undetected in our communities until alcohol related harms occur.

Alcohol screening and brief interventions (S&BI) have shown to be widely effective, however many primary care settings have had difficulty introducing this as a routine practice. In 2017, Murray PHN Needs Assessment indicated a number of alarming statistics including that “increases in ED presentations for AOD abuse induced mental health disorders and alcohol related deaths sitting at 33% above the Victorian average.”

In response to this, Murray PHN engaged Alaya to implement the Risky Drinking Project: Screening & Brief Interventions in General Practice to:

  • Improve early interventions for people considered to be ‘at risk’
  • Reduce harm associated with alcohol consumption and substance misuse
  • Engage and upskill general practice more broadly in alcohol screening and brief intervention.

Now in 2019, Murray PHN has commissioned Alaya to build on previous Risky Drinking Project activity in the current General Practice Investment Strategy – Embedding Screening & Brief Intervention in General Practice.

Though this project, Alaya will work with six general practice cluster groups to:

  • Develop a Community of Practice for the nurses employed within the clusters and build capacity of primary care staff to understand/embed S&BI (including use of AUDIT tool,etc.)
  • Develop new/amend existing resources, medical software templates and web pages (eg Risky Drinking Project resources)
  • Increase the knowledge of AOD screening and brief intervention tools in primary care. This will include CPD/RACGP applicable training, mentoring and more general troubleshooting support
  • Increase the use of screening tools and the delivery of Brief Intervention for alcohol consumption and substance misuse within the General Practice setting.

Over the coming months, Alaya will begin to roll out phase 2 of this project in alignment with the above response.

Talk to us about our other change management projects in the primary care sector or check out our Risky Drinking page full of resources for clinicians, primary care staff and clients.

SWSPHN’s e-Mental Health Toolkit

SWSPHN’s e-Mental Health Toolkit

Alaya’s consultants were commissioned by South Western Sydney PHN (SWSPHN) to develop an e-Mental Health Toolkit for consumers, carers and PHN funded mental health services within the region.

For our first step, we reviewed available e-Mental Health interventions including telephone support, online chat support, peer forums, structured online interventions and mobile apps, categorising each on their suitability for different cohorts:

  • Adults
  • Children and young people
  • Parents and families
  • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
  • Culturally and Linguistically diverse (CALD)
  • LGBTIQ communities

Each intervention was assessed within the stepped care model framework, identifying interventions suitable for people with mild – moderate or moderate – severe mental illness.

We consulted the sector on their use and knowledge of e-Mental Health resources and platforms. Through clinicians providing input via face-to-face, teleconference or telephone interviews and an online survey, we identified barriers to clinicians adopting e-Mental Health resources as an adjunct to face-to-face interventions:

  • Clinician’s time, capacity and awareness of resource
  • Lack of skills, experience and confidence in using e-Mental Health interventions
  • Difficult to easily identify reputable, evidenced-based resources
  • Lack of cohort-specific resources.

We summarised our work to date in the e-Mental Health Scoping and Consultation Report for SWSPHN. Armed with this report, SWSPHN built the e-Mental Health Toolkit, a user-friendly online navigation resource for consumers, carers and the sector.

Image Credit: Marco Verch Professional Photographer and Speaker via Flickr Creative Commons

SWSPHN’s Clinical Governance Framework

SWSPHN’s Clinical Governance Framework

Clinical governance supports the standard and compliance of a health care organisation’s clinical performance to assure all stakeholders of the safety, quality and continuous improvements of the services provided. Consumers and partnerships are central to identifying safety and quality issues and the solutions that must be implemented.

South Western Sydney PHN (SWSPHN) funds mental health services within a stepped mental health framework, as well as delivers service intake, triage and allocation. It is critical that SWSPHN delivered these programs with robust clinical governance which embeds and monitors quality, safety and equity. SWSPHN engaged Alaya Partners to review the mental health program’s clinical governance.

Alaya interviewed stakeholders and conducted full review of existing clinical governance mechanisms using a gap analysis methodology. The gap analysis included:

  • Each program’s defined scope and service delivery guidelines and requirements
  • Current internal clinical governance mechanisms and processes including committees and councils
  • Any issues / gaps / foreseen risks that require mitigation through clear governance
  • Current data collections and audit processes

The gap analysis report presented recommendations to strengthen clinical governance across four core areas:

  • SWSPHN’s Program Governance
  • PHN Service Delivery – Intake and Allocations
  • Program Delivery for SWSPHN contractors
  • Consumers and Carers

Alaya’s consultants partnered with PHN staff across multiple business units to develop the SWSPHN Mental Health Clinical Governance Framework and an array of supporting processes, policies and procedures for internal staff and sub-contractors to implement across its mental health programs and services.

Image Credit: koalazymonkey via Flickr Creative Commons