A mental health expert has described ways to improve Australia’s one-stop youth centre – Headspace.

Professor Patrick McGorry, Executive Director of Orygen, the National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health, and director of the board of Headspace, says Australia has led the world by investing in holistic mental health care for young people through Headspace - a system of “one-stop shops” for integrated health and social care for young people aged 12 to 25 years.

Ten years after the formation of Headspace, he wants to gather the information, concepts and strategies to guide the next phase of the project.

 “There are promising outcomes, with short-term outcomes improving for more than 60 per cent of young people,” Professor McGorry said.

“However there are improvements that could be made to the headspace model. Some young people, such as those with more complex and severe presentations, have not benefitted as greatly, because the primary care model of headspace alone is insufficiently resourced to respond.”

Headspace centres split their services into four streams of care: physical and sexual health, mental health, drug and alcohol expertise, and vocational services.

“However the core headspace grant to centres has never been indexed and hence services have been eroding every year,” Professor McGorry says.

“Defined funding streams for substance use and vocational interventions have not yet been developed.

“The failure to develop a sound financial model for encouraging general practitioner recruitment means that many centres still lack sufficient on-site GPs.

“We need the Australian Government to increase and index the core headspace grant, and specifically make it more viable financially for GPs to practice within a youth mental health setting,” Professor McGorry said.

He also said the government should be able to meet the needs of the substantial number of young people with more complex and severe mental health conditions.

He suggested this could be done by adopting three key approaches:

  • lifting the cap on allied health sessions (currently a maximum of 10 sessions are permitted) so a longer and more intensive tenure of headspace care is possible
  • providing more specialised care in areas such as complex mood disorders, psychosis, and eating, personality and substance-use disorders; and
  • funding mobile home-based and outreach interventions for young people who cannot access a centre or are difficult to engage.

“The Australian Government has a stream of funds tagged as ‘youth severe’ which is intended to respond to the needs of these patients,” Professor McGorry said.

“This stream should be substantially expanded, linked specifically to the Headspace funding directed towards these three key areas.”

More information is available here.