System-level integration to promote the mental health of Indigenous children: A community-driven mixed methods approach
Project Member(s): Percival, N.
Funding or Partner Organisation: National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC Project Grants)
National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC Project Grants)
Start year: 2019
Summary: Continuous quality improvement (CQI) has been successfully applied by Indigenous primary healthcare services (PHS) to clinical care, with positive healthcare service outcomes. But the relative contribution of clinical care to health outcomes is only 10-20%; a much larger share is determined by social and cultural factors. There is need for a systems approach where PHS apply CQI through vertical integration and horizontally. There is no better place to start than with Indigenous children's mental health. Traditional PHS approaches of promoting, preventing, screening and managing mental health conditions alone are not able to prevent the development of trajectories from mental health to at-risk states; innovative and evidence based community-led approaches are needed. We aim to use CQI processes to co-design, implement and evaluate the effectiveness of systems integration for children's mental health in three diverse Indigenous communities.
FOR Codes: Public health, Public Health and Health Services, Indigenous Health, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health