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

4. Outcomes of headspace Clients
These patterns are likely to reflect the cumulative impact of occasions of service on K10 outcomes;
however, the temptation to interpret the patterns of change in K10 by OoS interval in Figure 4.6 as a
response to increased treatment ‘dose’ should be resisted. It is likely that those who received more
occasions of service had complex issues, and therefore required extended treatment to improve their
condition.
Figure 4.6 Proportion of headspace clients showing clinically (CS) or reliably (RS) significant
improvement in K10, by age and occasion of service (OoS) interval
i. Females, CS improvement ii. Males, CS improvement
iii. Females, CS or RS improvement
iv. Males, CS or RS improvement
Notes: Calculations exclude those who are observed to engage with headspace for only a single OoS. Furthermore, the
K10 change for each OoS interval is generated only for those clients where there is an observed K10 at both OoS in the
difference (for example, the average difference in K10 between OoS1 and OoS6 is calculated only for those headspace
clients who have their K10 recorded on both the first and sixth visits. headspace clients are not requested to record their
K10 score at each occasion of service. This information is generally asked at the first, 3 rd , 6 th , 10 th and 15 th visits; however,
some clients record this information at other intervals. Further, not all clients provided information about their level of
psychological distress when asked. Smaller numbers of clients are observed as the number of occasions of service
increase. Cell sizes for these data can be found in Appendix F.
Source: Authors’ calculations from hCSA data.
Additional analyses and findings related to changes in K10 scores by Indigenous status, gender and
sexual identity, socio-economic status, and remoteness are provided in Appendix F.
Suicidal Ideation and Self-Harm
Changes in young people’s suicidal ideation and reported instances of self-harm were examined as
additional indicators of changes in mental health. This was undertaken to balance the substantive
weight placed on changes in K10 scores in the evaluation, and to highlight that relative stability in the
level of psychological distress as measured by K10 may not necessarily indicate a poor outcome.
Survey respondents were asked in each wave whether they had considered suicide in the last year.
A clinically significant change analysis was replicated using the intervention survey to categorise
respondents according to their prevalence of suicidal ideation by changes in K10. The results show
that focusing only on K10 scores can mask important changes in mental health functioning.
Social Policy Research Centre 2015
headspace Evaluation Final Report
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