Developing mental health system of care pathways for Brisbane North PHN
Status: Completed mid-2023
Client: Brisbane North PHN
Background
People living with complex mental health conditions generally benefit from various types of services and supports. Brisbane North PHN identified a need to better understand and define the various range of services and supports available for people with a range of complex mental health conditions in their region.
To help build out a suite of evidence-based care pathways, Brisbane North PHN engaged five expert-led agencies for selected priority conditions to work alongside Beacon Strategies to develop locally relevant and jointly agreed pathways covering the mental health service systems for eating disorders, intellectual disability, personality disorders, perinatal mental health issues, and suicide prevention.
Our role was to help support a consistent approach to the development of each pathway that reflects leading examples of service navigation pathways and piloted a pathway 'product'.
Approach
The project was delivered in several phases between 2021-2023 and involved:
creating a toolkit that outlined best practice advice, tools and templates to assist lead agencies in how to develop a system of care pathway
supporting lead agencies to establish an expert group and review existing guidelines and evidence to map the services and supports appropriate for a person experiencing a particular condition/circumstance
facilitating learning and collaboration activities to support lead agencies to connect, share insights and to inform the planning of product templates
scoping a 'digital pathway product' and building out the content for one pathway to be prototyped and piloted
providing guidance to BNPHN to inform future pathway development.
Outcomes
We worked closely with Brisbane North PHN and Eating Disorders Queensland to scope the design and development of a digital pathway product for eating disorders — it shows the ‘system of care’ for someone experiencing an eating disorder, and the carers or key supports involved in their care.
The pathway is hosted on the PHN's My Mental Health website — an existing platform that provides an interactive user experience and enables a user to source information and drill down to the level of detail that best meets their needs.
Some of the key learnings that emerged from the process that can guide Primary Health Networks and other organisations in developing systems of care pathways and service navigation tools include:
the importance of a structured project management approach and role clarity in a multi-agency environment
creating shared definitions around what is meant by key terminology
ensuring health literacy is a guiding principle
using digital technology to enable interactive service navigation products beyond static products.
Looking forward, the eating disorders pathway will be piloted with key learnings applied to enhance reach, usability and appropriateness of content — and to inform the development of future pathways for other systems of care.
Impact Vision Alignment
This project had a positive impact on the communities served by Brisbane North PHN by improving access to care, enhancing collaboration, increasing awareness, empowering individuals, and building capacity for delivering effective mental health services.
It directly aligned with our mission to create a more impactful social purpose sector:
Impact on community: By developing clear pathways to care, individuals living with complex mental health conditions and their families or carers would experience improved access to appropriate care.
Impact on social services sector: Increased collaboration between ourselves and several other organisations fostered a more integrated and coordinated approach to mental health care delivery in the community.
Book an obligation-free call with us to discuss your service design needs! Head to our service design page for more project examples like this one,
