Intellectual Disability Mental Health Service Pathway Tool | Department of Developmental Disability Neuropsychiatry (3DN)

A screenshot of the intellectual disability mental health connect website home page

Intellectual Disability Mental Health Connect is now live

The Intellectual Disability Mental Health Connect website is now available.

This website is for:

people with intellectual disability
support networks of people with intellectual disability including carers, family, support workers, friends, and advocates
mental health professionals and GPs
health, disability, and social service professionals.

Intellectual Disability Mental Health Connect provides plain English and Easy Read information on intellectual disability mental health pathways and aims to:

support people with intellectual disability and their support networks to navigate the mental health system and
assist mental health, health, disability, and social service professionals to provide high quality care and support to people with intellectual disability and mental health concerns.

Accessibility features are available.

Visit www.idmhconnect.health.

Background

Our research shows that the mental health workforce is ill-equipped to meet the mental health needs of people with intellectual disability, with staff receiving little education around making necessary adaptations to provide quality care for this group. Similarly, at a systems level, there is poor delineation of responsibilities and interagency pathways between different government services. The siloing, or separation, of health and disability services can result in blocked access and no clear referral pathway or collaboration between services. People with intellectual disability and their support networks also lack information about supports available, and when to access services.

To assist in addressing these barriers, this project will design a service pathway web-tool (the ‘Tool’) which aims to

target mainstream mental health services in NSW to promote collaborative approaches to service delivery for people with intellectual disability by guiding the development of localised, interconnected, and responsive services throughout a person’s mental health journey; and
provide tools for consumers to navigate the mental health sector.

Service users have reported that intellectual disability service, or care pathways clarified the care journey and reduced the repetition of assessment. Health professionals have said that service pathways deliver care in a more coordinated, standardised manner and improve communications due to a collaborative multidisciplinary approach. They have also been shown to significantly reduce the length of stay in specialist intellectual disability inpatient units.

Key components

A multi-phased, multi-method approach will be taken:

Phase 1: Consultation with people with intellectual disability, their family and support persons, and NSW mainstream mental health professionals.

What we found talking to people with intellectual disability and their support networks

Plain English report

Easy Read report

Phase 2: Development of the Tool based on the results of the consultation. We will work with web-developers to design and build the Tool.

Phase 3: Piloting and evaluation of the Tool.

Phase 4: Finalisation of the Tool based on pilot feedback

Phase 5: Launch and evaluation of the Tool across NSW. There is scope for the Tool be launched nationwide depending on the outcomes of the evaluation.

Intellectual Disability Mental Health Connect feedback study participant information

If you are taking part or thinking about taking part in our website feedback study, please see the Participant Information Sheets and Consent Forms below.

These sheets have more information about the study.

There are sheets for the: