Leading academics have questioned the effectiveness of headspace, which receives hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding.
Key points:
- A report has questioned whether a significant investment in headspace has been accompanied by health outcomes.
- headspace says report is ‘irrelevant’ and ‘inappropriate’
- The mental health service has received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding since 2006
A report published this week in The Medical Journal of Australia suggests that mental health outcomes do not match the significant outlay in funding for the youth network, headspace.
Jeffrey Looi, from the academic unit of psychiatry and addiction medicine at the Australian National University, told ABC Radio Melbourne that the article provides a summary of published assessments related to the effectiveness of care.
“The big picture is that there is very little evidence of substantial effectiveness, and the other part that is worrying is that very few of the people who received care in the service were actually in the published data,” he said.
Headspace has fiercely rejected the claims, saying its own studies show the services offered have resulted in “significant improvements” for 71 per cent of participants.
But Professor Looi said that one of the largest studies included just 0.5 per cent of young Australians who had used headspace.
He said public and private mental health services were assessed against agreed sets of measures in both inpatient and outpatient settings to ensure benchmarks in the outcome of care.
“The curious part is how little this type of assessment has been done for the headspace and why it hasn’t been done, which raises concerns,” said Professor Looi.
He said the report did not question the legitimacy of the services provided, but rather whether they were money well spent.
The report states that since it was established in 2006, headspace has raised funding totaling more than $1 billion.
This includes an allocation of $765.8 million as part of the federal government’s pandemic measures with the aim of establishing 10 new centres, to reach a total of 164 sites in Australia by 2025.
“Obviously there is a need in the community,” Professor Looi said.
“It’s about whether the money was well spent because of the evidence of effectiveness of care and that doesn’t seem to be available.”
The report was co-authored by Professor Steve Kisely, a researcher, psychiatrist and public health physician at the University of Queensland.
Both professors are part of a consortium of independent academic psychiatrists examining policy issues for the broader health system.
As headspace clients were often referred back to public mental health services, Professor Looi said it would be useful to consider strengthening funding for public mental health services.
“We think it’s a bottleneck in terms of access that needs to be expanded and it’s in line with concerns that have been raised about the capacity of the public mental health system — funding could be spent on that,” he said.
Other options include established partnerships between private practice and public hospitals with the inclusion of allied health support within the scope.
“The problem with potentially large-scale NGOs and personalized services is that they don’t interact effectively with other parts of health services,” said Professor Looi.
‘Ineffective results’
Headspace CEO Jason Trethowan said the report showed “evidence of considerable bias.”
“[It] is deliberately misleading, distorts mind space, and makes irrelevant and inappropriate claims,” Trethowan said.
“Over the past 16 years, headspace has provided more than four million services and supported more than 700,000 youth at our centers across the country,” he said.
“Headspace is firmly established as a critical component of the mental health care system and we are proud of what we offer, not only to young people but also to their families and the communities in which we operate.”
said a new study exploring the outcomes of youth accessing headspace support found that just under 71 percent of the 50,000 people surveyed reported better results.
“We know that young people’s mental health experience is unique, their search for help is fragile, and improved outcomes like these have a lifetime benefit,” said Mr Trethowan.
“The shocks of the last two years, including COVID-19, natural disasters and the rising cost of living, have disproportionately affected young people and young people are turning to the head for help in greater numbers than never”.
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