Can anyone link me to a resource that explains the way community health is set up now with the recent changes?
My understanding is that community mental health moved to a stepped care model. The idea is that you ring a central hub managed by the PHN, they ask you a few questions, grade you between a "1" to a "5" and then assign you to a support based on that scoring, in your local community.
My experience is that I was assigned to someone who had little experience and had no idea what to do with me outside of googling private sector alternatives, which is not an option: I was handballed, ghosted, then told that the provider thought I wanted to be exited (after I stated I didn't think they were equipped to treat me), so I was exited without any input of my own. This entire process took about a year and a half.
The problem is that there really exist no supports for anyone between a "3" to a "4 and a half", only low level supports and only acute supports, neither of which meet my needs. My only request was I be given a support that wasn't CBT based, who didn't ask me to fill in worksheets. That it took the PHN and two different providers eighteen months to come to the conclusion this is not something they could do worries me greatly.
Not only for myself, but for the community more broadly. The focus of the "stepped care model [edited by moderator] seems to be on very low quality "lowest common denominator" approaches that are quick to deliver, require little training of staff, and are delivered regardless of effectiveness, regardless of if these approaches are relevant to the majority of people seeking support. While claiming there are services for people with low, mid-level, and serious mental health needs, I believe very strongly from my own experience that the PHN and providers they commission are utterly incapable of carrying out this task. That the PHN could not find a single therapist, anywhere in their network, who was able to provide any kind of psychological therapy from outside of a Cognitive Behavioural approach shows that their entire setup is not viable and not based in best practice.
Where can I find out more information about the PHN's structure and what they are legislated/mandated to do? I feel that they're utterly failing in their most basic task, but finding information about how things are technically structured makes trying to change this a bit difficult!
