Mental Health Literacy Initiative Co-Design Project: South Western Sydney PHN
Status: Completed in Auguat 2021
Client: South Western Sydney PHN
Background
South Western Sydney PHN (SWSPHN) is implementing the Mental Health Commission of New South Wales’ Health Literacy Initiative, which aims to enhance health service responsiveness to people with a lived experience and increase health equity.
As part of the local implementation of this Initiative in the South Western Sydney region, the PHN engaged Beacon Strategies to lead a co-design process with the community, local services and health professionals which informs mental health literacy activities and the development of resources and tools.
Beacon Strategies determined the mental health literacy needs and potential activities to be implemented by SWSPHN, through the following objectives:
A structured co-design process capturing a diverse perspective relating to the mental health literacy needs of the South Western Sydney region.
Developed an understanding of mental health literacy needs of the region and identified gaps in the responsiveness of services
Provided implementation considerations and recommendations to South Western Sydney PHN to guide future mental health literacy activities and the development of resources and tools needed within the region.
Approach
Kicking off in April 2021, our approach to delivering this project consisted of:
developing a situational analysis to summarise the project context and drivers
developing a planned and targeted engagement approach that effective and meaningfully engages with priority population groups identified for the region
recruiting and orienting participants to the process
two loops of co-design activities, with the first loop to ‘discover and define’ and the second loop to ‘develop and deliver’. Each of these co-design loops will involve consultation with a sample of participants followed by a feedback loop to check interpretation and capture broader perspectives
developing a report and recommendations back to the PHN to inform the implementation of mental health literacy activities and further iterative design with communities into the future.
Beacon Strategies was pleased to partner with expert facilitators Carrie Lumby from Troubled Dog and Rebecca Sng from The Peregrine Centre to design and deliver the co-design methodology.
Outcomes
A final report for this project was delivered in August 2021. Several key themes emerged from the findings of the co-design process which were covered in the report, including:
community members lacking the knowledge to identify mental health concerns within themselves and others in the community, and lacking skills to respond appropriately.
community and provider concerns highlighting a need for improvement of general mental health literacy within the wider community, with targeted and culturally appropriate approaches within the community for particular demographics.
demographic profiles of communities in South West Sydney suggesting that local residents are more likely to be at a greater risk of poor health literacy
A list of recommended activities for SWSPHN to address these three key areas of need was also provided. Read about how Primary Health Networks can strengthen mental health literacy in a blog written by Beacon Strategies Director, Elliot Parkinson here.