Is headspace making a difference to young people’s lives?

3. Access and Engagement with Centres
Related to this, most parents indicated that the pathway to the young person receiving headspace
services was often rather complex, and relatively few of the young people in this sample had directly
accessed a headspace centre. Many had a poor experience with another service before finding and
attending headspace.
3.5 How are headspace services provided to young people in remote or regional
areas? What facilitates and hinders the provision of extended services?
As indicated in section 3.2 above, headspace is achieving some success in reaching young people
who live in regional areas, and who are over-represented as headspace clients in relation to their
numbers in the general population of young people aged 12-25 years. While the proportion of clients
living in remote locations is very small, it roughly aligns with population figures.
Despite this success, service provision to young people living in regional and remote areas is largely
dependent upon them attending a headspace centre. Many of these young people live a considerable
distance from a headspace centre, and a lack of transport is a restricting factor for many young
people. As indicated above, the majority of young people that attend a headspace centre live within
10 kilometres of the centre.
To ensure that services are provided to young people living in regional and remote areas, centres
have been established in a number of locations that can service nearby regional or rural communities
through outreach models. The headspace centre in Warwick, for example, provides a weekly
outreach service to the nearby town, Stanthorpe. In addition, the Townsville centre collaborates with
other local services to provide fortnightly outreach services at a local skate park.
Staff interviewed and some service providers surveyed reported the challenges associated with
providing face-to-face services and support to geographically isolated young people, as well as their
desire for headspace to do outreach:
I’m originally from a rural area and I’ve lived in cities for quite a while, but I still have a big
love for making sure rural stuff gets looked at, and it is an area I still don’t think headspace
looks at enough. I think it’s more looked at purely on the numbers of people that are around
and not really considering the fact that rural and remote areas have historically never gotten
the support that they need, and I think this model of service would be amazing in more rural
areas (Clinical Team Leader)
I would love to ideally set up a pop up counselling space in [name of regional town], and we’d
operate out of a bus, or we’d operate out of an office somewhere or something like that,
because there’s major gaps there. Young people out there don’t see workers (Youth Worker).
When asked how headspace could be improved to better meet the needs of young people, 13%
of respondents (20/157) to the Professional Stakeholders Survey called for increased ‘outreach’
services. For example:
There would be great value in developing a mobile headspace treatment space for young
people in isolated regional towns and villages.
There is a need for additional staff with appropriate resources to outreach to our outlying
communities as there is no public transport options for young people to access the service.
Providing service delivery within local communities through outreach satellite services would
be beneficial.
The need for outreach services was a clear priority for service provider respondents, but two staff
members from different headspace centres identified current barriers in the model’s structure. One
staff member, for example, expressed concern about the funding model for outreach:
I don’t think the business model we run here is likely to work in [in remote areas] because
people are going to expect to be paid more, or have some kind of incentives… The grants
for those sort of centres will need to be substantially higher. They are going to need corporate
partnering (Clinical Team Leader)
In another location, a manager described her centre offering a form of outreach to young people
who were not geographically isolated, but who were unlikely to come into headspace without an
Social Policy Research Centre 2015
headspace Evaluation Final Report
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