Enhanced access to specialised care leads to better outcomes, but its realisation in practice requires us to challenge traditional notions of how mental health care is delivered.
Great read! Question- How does this inform the current model for community youth mental health, particularly in early intervention/ low intensity support? Say for example we could scale the use of clinically effective digital CBT for C&YP who meet a 1a clinical stage without the need for a referral into enhanced primary care. How would you expedite this pathway so they still get assessed by a specialist to make a clinical assessment but without the extensive wait times experienced currently via Headspace referrals etc. ? I’m trying to understand how we decouple the need for specialised assessment upfront / whilst still being able to utilise scalable and cost effective clinically effective treatments like digital CBT
Thanks Duncan for the thoughtful comment. It probably won't come as a surpise that I think the answer is a technology infrastructure that supports both direct access to the kind of specialist assessment upfront while facilitating pathways from there (either to digital CBT as you suggest, or to some other combination of providers). Then, from there the use of measurment-based care is critical to ensure people continue to get what they need. No doubt the reliability of such systems needs to be thoroughly tested, but I think thats solvable.
Great read! Question- How does this inform the current model for community youth mental health, particularly in early intervention/ low intensity support? Say for example we could scale the use of clinically effective digital CBT for C&YP who meet a 1a clinical stage without the need for a referral into enhanced primary care. How would you expedite this pathway so they still get assessed by a specialist to make a clinical assessment but without the extensive wait times experienced currently via Headspace referrals etc. ? I’m trying to understand how we decouple the need for specialised assessment upfront / whilst still being able to utilise scalable and cost effective clinically effective treatments like digital CBT
Thanks Duncan for the thoughtful comment. It probably won't come as a surpise that I think the answer is a technology infrastructure that supports both direct access to the kind of specialist assessment upfront while facilitating pathways from there (either to digital CBT as you suggest, or to some other combination of providers). Then, from there the use of measurment-based care is critical to ensure people continue to get what they need. No doubt the reliability of such systems needs to be thoroughly tested, but I think thats solvable.