Leadership and Governance
Leadership and Governance Implementation Guidance
Determine common agendas and policies
Successful implementation of integrated care for youth mental health is driven, first and foremost, by the passion of mental health professionals. From leadership through to staff, there must be a commitment to a common agenda for integration and how it will be achieved or improved. This common agenda should also apply between services for consistent guiding principles.
Key steps to achieve this include:
- Establishing (or reviewing) strategic objectives and organisational policies
- Effectively communicating these within and across services
- Ensuring all staff have access to training and resources to implement the objectives and policies.
Embrace joint leadership and service level agreements
Building strong and trusting partnerships with other services can as long as five years and requires continuing oversight from senior leaders. You might wish to consider joint or distributed leadership and activities to drive stronger service-level integration and facilitate better access to care for young people.
Formal documentation and service level agreements are recommended to establish a clear inter-organisational governance framework. (See the resources on this page for a template).
Consider partnerships with different health funders and service providers, including:
- Commonwealth, State/Territory or local governments
- Non-government organisations
- Private organisations (eg. health insurers)
Adapt your partnership style for specific circumstances. As well as formal partnerships you could consider establishing communities of practice to develop skills and networks, or inter-organisational alliances like joint working groups or steering committees.
Involve young people throughout implementation
Person-centred care is a core value of youth mental health service delivery and integrated care models. Actively involving young people and their carers ensures services are responsive to local needs and drive stronger integration. You can achieve this by:
- Establishing a youth reference group or committee
- Co-designing models of service delivery with consistent feedback from young people and/or their carers
- Collecting feedback from young people and family members (ensure consent processes are in place)
Embed values into service through shared policies
Shared policies help embed values within and across service providers, establishing trust and collective commitment to core principles. As a starting point, seek to understand whether your service partners already have policies that drive effective youth mental health practice:
- Youth engagement
- Family and carer engagement
- Trauma-informed care
- Recovery-oriented practice
- Priority populations
- Staged/stepped care
- NSW Family and Carer Mental Health Program framework
- Orygen: youth service delivery
Remember these values will be enacted differently by young people, carers, service organisations, governments, managers and clinicians.
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Mindgardens Neuroscience Network acknowledges the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognises their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respect to them and their cultures, and to Elders past, present and emerging.
We acknowledge the voices of people with lived experience, their carers, families and kinship groups. We recognise the expertise acquired through living with a mental health, drug and alcohol or neurological disorder and acknowledge those who care for people on their recovery journey. We place lived experience at the heart of all that we do.
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