Scroll Down
CHN, ACT’s PHN worked in partnership with the Office for Mental Health and Wellbeing (the Office) and the Youth Coalition of the ACT to understand the challenges experienced by children and young people with moderate to severe mental health concerns. Together, we learned the complexity of these issues and found that a range of barriers to support exist at both the service level and the system level, including outside the mental health sector. To address these barriers, a different way of working across sectors was required to support better coordination and collaboration.
In 2023, CHN, the Office and the Youth Coalition established the Child and Youth Mental Health Services Alliance (the Alliance), after a co-development process with a range of stakeholders. The Alliance enables a structured, formal mechanism for multiple stakeholder groups to connect and work collaboratively across a fragmented system, towards a common goal of improving service system responses for children and young people. The Alliance aims to be responsive at a range of levels – from high-level strategic planning, through to supporting frontline workers to connect and improve practice. This has led to the Alliance being supported by a range of components which have all been built over the last year, including:
- backbone support and governance, enabled by the 3 lead agencies and a Coordinating Committee that includes government, community and lived experience representation
- strategic coordination and collaboration, through bi-annual Alliance forums, a youth reference group, and Alliance working groups that progress specific issues
- practice, information sharing, and connection, through a community of practice, an Alliance website, and monthly e-bulletins.
Enabled by these components, the Alliance has identified 2 key priorities to be initially progressed by the working group: improving young people’s experiences of mental health services and improving service and system responses for people with complex or co-occurring concerns. The working group has developed projects to address these priorities.
The goal of the Alliance is to make the invisible visible – through naming the challenges and barriers occurring in the system and having clear and transparent processes. In its first full year of operation, the Alliance has taken substantial actions towards this and seen some positive early outcomes. The Alliance enables different parts of the system to work together to begin solving systemic problems, and breaking down silos between services, sectors, and with young people and families. It is building shared understandings of issues and priorities, and pooling knowledge and scarce resources for genuine system outcomes that cannot be achieved by one individual or organisations on their own.
In addition to the direct work of the Alliance, the connections and conversations occurring through those activities act as a common shared platform enabling organisations to come together. for additional work to occur. Key enablers that support these early outcomes include a collaborative and trust-based relationship between the 3 lead agencies that allows the Alliance to be co-owned across our PHN, government and community; inclusion of youth lived experience; and strong engagement and commitment across the membership. The recognition that child and youth mental health is a whole of community issue allows a range of system players to work together to improve mental health outcomes. The collaboration and integration created by the Alliance exemplifies the power of a unified voice in creating change.
