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

5. Service Delivery Model
her mother from her counselling sessions:
The only thing that wasn’t useful was I couldn’t really tell her everything because Mum was
there. That’s something I think that annoyed me. I didn’t want to say ‘I don’t want mum to be
here’ because then mum would be like ‘oh what have you been up to’… Mum just wanted to
come, like, all the time she wanted to be there and sit with me and I didn’t want her to but I
didn’t want to tell her to go away (Female, 14)
When probed further, it was clear that this young person had seen her counsellor separately at times,
but she did not want her mother included in any counselling sessions.
5.5 How could the headspace service model be improved to better meet the needs of
parents/carers in supporting young people?
The Parents and Carers Study collected data on how the headspace model could be improved to
better meet the needs of this important stakeholder group. This section reports study findings that
can be classified into two areas: ways that the model can be enhanced to better meet the needs of
parents and carers in supporting young people, and ways that the model can be expanded to better
meet the needs of the family as a whole.
The study found that parents and carers, in general, were highly satisfied with the services their
young person was receiving at headspace, and they reported improvements in their young person’s
mental health outcomes since receiving services. Despite this high level of satisfaction, study
participants did suggest ways that the service model could be improved to better meet their needs
as a carer. Firstly, a common complaint of focus group participants whose young person was using
headspace services was that they had not heard of headspace before their young person started
receiving services, and they wished they had known about it earlier:
Then we went through another school psychologist and we wasted six months and in the
process he got worse. Nobody mentioned headspace.
I’ve lived in [suburb] all my life [and] I didn’t even know about this place and I wish I knew
years and years ago.
The Parents and Carers Survey confirmed this by showing that awareness of headspace was
relatively low among parents and carers. In fact, 40% of parents that participated in the survey had
not heard of headspace prior to receiving a referral or recommendation to the service. This finding
suggests that headspace could be improved for this stakeholder group by implementing strategies
that promote community awareness – thereby ensuring that parents have more choice regarding
youth mental healthcare.
The Parents and Carers Study included a significant proportion of participants whose young person
had received services through other mental health services. Although parents and carers generally
felt that headspace was more accessible than other services, they identified several barriers to
accessing headspace. The most commonly-mentioned barrier was the difficulty that some parents
had in making appointments for their young person outside of school or working hours:
I’ve had to take [my child] out of school so many times just to come to an appointment which
– it’s not the service’s fault because that’s the hours they operate but if they were a little bit
altered... that would suit me.
She didn’t have a problem going but the only appointments were in school hours. I was
struggling to get her to school and then taking her out of school to go to appointments was
defeating the purpose.
You’re a working parent too, like I finish at 3.30pm every day. I can come for the afternoon but
each time they make an appointment that’s a day off work for me.
A few parents commented – as in this last quote – that taking their young person to headspace
appointments had negatively impacted on their work productivity. A few other parents commented
that they had to wait a number of weeks if they wanted an appointment outside of school or work
hours. It is therefore suggested that the service model could be enhanced to better meet the needs
of parents by increasing the capacity of centres to offer more appointments and, as a consequence,
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headspace Evaluation Final Report
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