https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12412/2547 Fri, 06 Nov 2026 07:12:02 GMT 2026-11-06T07:12:02Z https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12412/7438 The Integrated Mental Health Atlas of the Central and Eastern Sydney PHN Hopman, Kate; Maas, Cailin; Salinas-Perez, Jose A.; Fernandez, Ana; Xu, Tianxi; Alvarez-Galvez, Javier; Prigent, Amelie; Gandré, Coralie; Salvador-Carulla, Luis The 2014 National Review of Mental Health Programmes and Services by the National Mental Health Commission drew attention to the need of local planning of care for people with a lived experience of mental illness in Australia and the relevance of a bottom-up approach to understanding “services available locally [in] the development of national policy”. It also called for responsiveness to the diverse local needs of different communities across Australia (1). The findings from the National Review were in line with the recommendations presented by the New South Wales (NSW) Mental Health Commission in the report Living Well: A Strategic Plan for Mental Health in NSW 2014-2024. Living Well (2) identified that Local Health Districts (LHD) and primary care organisations such as Medicare Locals and their replacement Primary Health Networks (PHN) should implement strategies to ensure that scarce clinical skills are employed to the best effect and the need to harness new technology to support clinicians and service providers with new tools to improve care, data collection and information sharing. The Integrated Mental Health Atlas of Central and Eastern Sydney PHN (CESPHN) aligns with these recommendations. The Atlas is the region’s first inventory of available services specifically targeted for people with a lived experience of mental illness, from which it will be possible to derive benchmarks and comparisons with other regions of NSW. This will inform services planning and the allocation of resources where they are most needed. It is a tool for evidence-informed planning that critically analyses the pattern of mental health care provided within the boundaries of the CESPHN. We used a standard classification system, the "Description and Evaluation of Services and Directories in Europe for long-term care" model (DESDE-LTC), to describe and classify the services; as well as geographical information systems to geo-locate the services. Utilisation of the DESDE-LTC tool, a system widely used in Europe, has enabled a more robust understanding of what services actually provide and will enable planners to make comparisons across areas and regions, once this methodology is more widely available. The Atlas revealed major differences in the provision of mental health care in the CESPHN, when compared to other regions and countries. These are: 1) the good availability of inpatient acute care and outpatient care, 2) a lack of acute and sub-acute community residential care as alternatives to hospital care; 3) a comparative lack of services providing acute day care and non-acute day care (i.e. day centres providing structured activities to promote health and social inclusion); 4) lower availability of specific employment and housing services for people with a lived experience of mental illness; 5) lower availability of supported accommodation initiatives. Taken together the information in this Atlas highlights key areas for consideration for future planning for the provision of mental health services in the CESPHN. The findings reflect some Framework Integrated Mental Health Atlas of Central and Eastern Sydney PHN of the recommendations in the recent report of the National Review of Mental Health Programmes and Services made by the National Mental Health Commission. Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12412/7438 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12412/7437 The Integrated Atlas of Psychosocial Care in the Western Sydney Primary Health Network Region Furst, MaryAnne; Salinas-Perez, Jose A.; Hopman, Kate; Bagheri, Nasser; Gillespie, James; Mendoza, John; Salvador-Carulla, Luis The Australian mental health system has undergone profound change in recent years, both at national and regional level. Key reforms include the establishment of Primary Health Networks (PHNs) in 2014 to act in a commissioning role to improve regional co-ordination of health care; as well as the late inclusion of mental health into the progressive rollout out of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). These changes have arisen in the context of a system described in a national review in 2014 as siloed and fragmented, with people unable to consistently access the appropriate level of support for their need (National Mental Health Commission, 2014). In its response to these and other challenges in the system, The Fifth National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Plan (Commonwealth of Australia, 2017) has prioritised a person centred approach based on integrated regional planning and a stepped care model of service availability. In the complex mental healthcare landscape, PHNs, working in the space between policy makers and service providers, are well positioned to take a key role in the implementation of this vision. An important part of their role in this is the development of regional plans, key to which is the mapping of current service levels and workforce. Integrated Atlases of Mental Health have already mapped and documented 20 PHN regions in Australia, including the Western Sydney region in 2014 (Salvador-Carulla et al., 2016), using the Description and Evaluation of Services and Directories for Long Term Care (DESDE- LTC) to provide a snapshot of service provision (Fernandez et al., 2015). The use of a standardised tool enables comparison, both with other jurisdictions and in the same jurisdiction over time. This second Atlas of the Western Sydney Primary Health Network (WSPHN) region will provide a picture of current psychosocial service provision in Western Sydney, as well as a comparison to that provided in 2014 in the first Integrated Mental Health Atlas of Western Sydney. It is the first in Australia to provide an analysis of the evolution of a system over time, and is particularly relevant given the period of intense change since the first Atlas in 2014. While this Atlas is focussed on psychosocial services, excluding care provided by the public health sector, this type of care and the Non- Government Organisation (NGO) sector as a whole is in the frontline of the impact of system reform. Data collection for this atlas was from January 16 to April 30, 2019. Twenty-two services were interviewed, providing a total of 69 teams and 81 Main Types of Care (MTC). In addition, we identified 13 satellites or secondary sites where teams were providing care, bringing the total number of MTC in the region to 98. This can be compared to our findings in 2014 of 22 services providing 40 teams and 42 MTCs. This increase in availability, however, is evident in the number but not the diversity, of types of care available. As anticipated, we have found evidence of significant and sometimes unexpected change in the system. Our main findings are an almost threefold increase in the availability of psychosocial services, and a trend towards more health related than social care. We found increased system complexity and fragility, with the presence of a number of satellite teams in the region being a pattern more characteristic of rural areas, and in fact not previously identified in urban region such as this; and with almost half of services lacking funding stability for more than 12 months. We found increases in availability of care for most population groups and in all branches of care, but particularly so in the areas of the Transition to Adulthood age group, services for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) communities, and non- mobile health related Outpatient care. With a population younger than the national average and a relatively high rate of people in the region born overseas, services for these populations have been identified as priority areas for mental health care by the PHN (WentWest, 2018). The increase in overall availability appears to be partly attributable to the increased presence Integrated Atlas of Psychosocial Care in the WSPHN region 2019 of larger national organisations in the region, with new providers moving in and current providers increasing their service provision. Interestingly, despite this, we found no significant change in the number of smaller service providers in the region. On the other hand, similar to the previous Atlas, we found gaps in the provision of Daycare, particularly health related Day care, Residential care and Outpatient social care. We also identified gaps in some of the other priority areas identified by the PHN, namely those for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ) population, for older people and for people with mental illness experiencing homelessness. Taken together, the information in this atlas can be used to provide an insight into the evolution of the mental health system during a time of great change. It provides one measure of the extent and direction of the change being experienced in a complex mental health care landscape. Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12412/7437 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12412/7426 Patterns of service provision in child and adolescent mental health care in Australia Salvador-Carulla, L.; Furst, M.A.; Tabatabaei-Jafari, H.; Mendoza, J.; Riordan, D.; Moore, E.; Rock, D.; Anthes, L.; Bagheri, N.; Salinas-Perez, J.A. Standard description of local care provision is essential for evidence-informed planning. This study aimed to map and compare the availability and diversity of current mental health service provision for children and adolescents in Australia. We used a standardised service classification instrument, the Description and Evaluation of Services and DirectoriEs (DESDE) tool, to describe service availability in eight urban and two rural health districts in Australia. The pattern of care was compared with that available for other age groups in Australia. Outpatient care was found to be the most common type of service provision, comprising 212 (81.2%) of all services identified. Hospital care (acute and non-acute) was more available in urban than in rural areas (20 services [9.7%] vs 1 [1.8%]). The level of diversity in the types of care available for children and adolescents was lower than that for the general adult population, but slightly higher than that for older people in the same areas. Standardised comparison of the pattern of care across regions reduces ambiguity in service description and classification, enables gap analysis and can inform policy and planning. Tue, 20 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12412/7426 2022-12-20T00:00:00Z https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12412/7425 European Union. Mental health care ecosystems Gutiérrez-Colosía, M.R.; Salinas-Perez, J.A.; Salvador-Carulla, L. Mental health care is a health policy priority in Europe and the reform and scaling-up of services a key target. For that, a more balanced hospital-ambulatory approach is needed as it has been recognized that community-based care has a positive impact in quality of life of patients. The generation and use of scientific knowledge for mental health policy and planning is essential on the path to a balanced system. Health care ecosystem research follows a bottom-up approach that intends to include the local evidence of mental health care systems to overcome the usual limited top-down perspective. For that purpose, system tools like mental health atlas are now providing standardized empirical data about service provision in an area, based on taxonomies like the ESMS/DESDE system. Atlases in turn, support advanced modelling tools like the Efficient Decision Support -Mental Health (EDeS-MH) to improve knowledge on the health ecosystem, resource allocation and management in regional planning. Tue, 15 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12412/7425 2022-11-15T00:00:00Z