Project Description
Children and young people living in regional and remote parts of Western Australia face particular and unique challenges in terms of mental health, especially around accessing services. In particular, there is an acute shortage of services and programs for children and young people who require treatment services because they have a mental health illness. Mental Health Professionals, including psychiatrists must travel significant distances to deliver a service in regional and remote areas and this has a negative impact on already limited service capability.
The 2018 Australian Senate inquiry into accessibility and quality of mental health services in rural and remote Australia reported that an absence of an agreed clinical model has resulted in an ever-changing range of initiatives that provide short-term unsustainable and non-generalisable ‘fixes’. In an attempt to improve access to psychiatry for young people living in regional areas innovative models of care have been introduced. Currently, WA has three primary models of delivering psychiatric services to children and adolescents; Resident Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists, Fly-In-Fly-Out Psychiatry, and tele-psychiatry. The benefits of tele-psychiatry are especially true for young people in regional and remote areas where isolation and being unable to access services are significant barriers. However, it is acknowledged that not all children and young people have access to the internet and ICT is not a suitable replacement for face-to-face supports in their entirety.
The focus of this project is restricted to the utility of videoconferencing-based approaches in delivering mental health-care. This project seeks to evaluate the usefulness of tele-psychiatry as a mode of service-delivery, efficacy, effectiveness and the limitations of this form of service-delivery. This project will influence funding and policy advances to ensure the most effective and efficient psychiatric services are delivered to children and adolescents in rural and remote areas.
Project Objectives
The aim of this research project is to review the effectiveness, efficiency, acceptability and patient satisfaction of the existing tele-psychiatry models of psychiatric care for young people (0-17 years) living in WA Country Health Service regions.
Objectives:
1. Conduct a review of evidence of the effectiveness, acceptability, satisfaction and model transferability of face-to-face, Fly-In-Fly-Out and tele-psychiatry models of psychiatric care in children and adolescents.
2. Complete and submit an ethics application to allow for the next step of the project (out of scope of this Internship), which includes;
a) Analysis of the utilisation of psychiatric services for the different models of care for young people who reside in WACHS regions
b) Analysis of the health outcomes for young patients of psychiatric services who reside in WACHS regions.
Industry Participant
WA Country Health Service
Tonia Ledwith (Supervisor)
Vineet Padmanahban (Mentor)
Research Participants
Curtin University
Anastasia Blackwell (Student)
Professor Suzanne Robinson (Supervisor)
La Trobe University
Dr Urooj Kahn (Academic mentor)
Professor James Boyd (Supervisor)
Project Value:
$21,250
