Australia’s mental health leaders face a challenge
Our mental health systems are not designed to cope with the scale and demand that Covid-19, the recession, and the ongoing climate crisis will create. We can expect outcomes to fall, and the cost to government, businesses and families to rise.
But it doesn’t have to be this way
Key to effective and economically viable transformation will be harnessing the latent resources in communities, including people who have themselves experienced mental ill-health, distress and trauma.
Our experience consistently points to four priority actions:
Do co-production authentically, so services better meet needs of those they serve.
Build a mental health system fit for the future.
Address the structural drivers of mental health.
Support communities to innovate and create new mental health roles and responses for themselves.
If you’re excited by these opportunities and interested in partnering with us or learning more, we’d love to talk to you.
1. Do co-production authentically
There’s national recognition that our mental health system needs to be more person-centred, but mental health organisations vary greatly in their confidence and readiness to do this.
Being truly person-centred means professionals sharing power with community members to partner on decisions about policy, commissioning, design and delivery. This takes changes in culture, capability and structures. It takes time and money. It takes practice.
Co-production done well leads to services that better meet the needs of the people they serve, yet co-production done poorly can be costly, slow, ineffective and even damage relationships with the community.
We recommend that organisational leaders invest in building the conditions for co-production.
For example by
Building trusting relationships with community members
Intentionally shifting internal cultures
Learning from others who have done it before
Running demonstration projects that build capability while showing what’s possible
Developing specialist teams and processes
We recommend system leaders invest in appropriately resourcing and incentivising changes in culture and capabilities. For example, through capability building funds, creating new institutions to build capability, funding flows that encourage co-production, and awards for excellence in person-centred decision making.