Creating tools and resources to meet Mental Health Literacy needs for HNC
Status: Completed Oct 2022
Client: Healthy North Coast (North Coast PHN)
Background:
The Health Literacy Initiative delivered by the NSW Mental Health Commission aimed to improve outcomes for individuals with mental health issues, as well as their carers and kinship groups.
Healthy North Coast prioritised two action areas to focus on:
Programs that would help people act early.
Easily available/accessible information on community support.
HNC engaged Beacon Strategies in 2022 to lead a co-design process that would inform the development of locally relevant tools and resources aligned to the two priority action areas.
The co-design process involved people with lived experience through engagement with members of a Lived Experience Panel.
Approach
The co-design process focused on two key areas:
Programs to help people act early when they feel ‘something is not quite right.’
Good and easily available information on community supports (formal and informal).
Our approach to delivering the North Coast Mental Health Literacy Project consisted of four key phases:
Phase 1: Discover people’s experiences
Project schedule created
Experience panel established
Desktop research completed
Phase 2: Define the mental health literacy needs of local communities
Co-design plan developed
Co-design workshops held
Feedback loop surveys completed
Phase 3: Develop potential solutions to respond to the needs
Product (Health literacy tools & resources) developed and refined
Phase 4: Deliver the product ready to implement and test
Close out workshop held
Implementation and evaluation guidance presented to Healthy North Coast
Outcomes
We produced a detailed report for HNC outlining the summary of the co-design findings as well as recommendations for further progress in the project.
We also recommended the creation of a ‘Supporting self-care’ online resource to be hosted on the HNC page with a call to action for people to complete a personalised self-care plan.
Vision Alignment
This project aligned with our vision to help create a more impactful social service sector by helping to create a tool that allowed people seeking mental health to help find what they need.
Good mental health literacy is about having knowledge, understanding and skills to promote mental health and reduce the impact of mental illness. The tool would help people understand when they may need to seek help which would help reduce stress on other services, such as hospitals.
As a mission-based health and social services consultancy, Beacon Strategies is committed to partnering with PHNs to better plan, design, implement, evaluate and communicate their work in delivering health outcomes for local communities. Head to https://beaconstrategies.net/primary-health-networks to read more about our work with PHNs.
