Whose care? Our Care! is a national multi-phase project coordinated by researchers in the ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation and funded until 2030 through the Medical Research Future Fund Million Minds Mental Health Grant 2023.
Neami is a founding partner of the ALIVE National Centre, previously we collaborated to evaluate the implementation of the Urgent Mental Health Care Centre in Adelaide and Medicare Mental Health Centres (formerly Head to Health) in Darwin, Townsville, Penrith and Geelong.
The outcomes of that co-evaluation work have informed the Whose Care? Our Care! project aims, which are to establish the accessibility, cultural responsiveness and integration of lived experience in new mental health, suicide prevention and social and emotional wellbeing service models.
Whose care? Our Care! has a particular focus on culturally diverse groups, LGBTQIA+ and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, with an emphasis on addressing health inequalities currently experienced by many in these population groups. It is about working with communities at a local level to generate and test strategies for reducing inequities.
This project is a collaboration between nine universities and six other mental health organisations across 25 locations in Australia. All of Neami’s Mental Health Hub services will be participating services in this project.
How Neami is involved
Some of the ways that Neami staff and consumers will be involved in this project are:
- Service managers and some service staff in key roles will be invited to have conversations with the research team.
- All staff working in Neami’s participating services will be invited to complete a survey.
- Some staff will participate in co-design workshops that will be collecting feedback and understanding perspectives about the data that services collect and use with aims to improve.
- Staff from participating services will be invited to attend online check in meetings with their peers and facilitated by ALIVE researchers.
- A small group of people who have accessed Neami services will be invited to participate in open conversations to help provide understanding about how they decided to attend the Neami services, and how their longer-term continuity of care was supported.
