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

3. Access and Engagement with Centres
Table 3.5 Proportion of clients and regional areas who felt that they had waited too long for
an appointment*
YP felt they waited too long for
No Yes missing Total
appointment
major cities 80.7% 7.8% 11.5% 100%
regional areas 78.4% 6.8% 14.8% 100%
* Insufficient data to include an analysis of remote centres.
Source: Authors calculations from hCSA data.
As indicated in the Centre Managers Survey, the wait times vary according to the practitioner
type, with young people waiting longest to see occupational therapists, clinical psychologists and
psychiatrists (reported average waiting time in days of 18.4 to 19.6), and shorter waiting periods for
vocational workers, youth workers and social workers (reported average waiting time in days of 7.6;
8.6; and 12.4 respectively).
Cultural appropriateness
As indicated above, headspace is achieving some success in engaging Indigenous young people.
Analysis indicates that a significantly higher proportion of Indigenous young people have accessed
headspace services than Indigenous young people in the general population (7.4% versus 3.7%).
However, interviews with staff in five fieldwork sites confirmed that headspace could do more to
make the service more culturally appropriate for Indigenous clients:
As an organisation I think that we could be better at meeting young Aboriginal people and
finding out what they want from us (Youth Worker)
A number of staff who were interviewed raised concerns about staffing, with most being critical of
the fact that their centre did not have an Aboriginal worker. While it was acknowledged that lack of
suitably qualified Aboriginal staff was a sector-wide problem, it needs to be addressed as it was clear
that a number of non-Aboriginal staff found it challenging to engage Aboriginal young people.
As well as staff shortages, a few workers commented that the centre-based service model did not
meet the needs of Indigenous young people: ‘Aboriginal kids don’t usually like coming into an office.’
One staff member further explained:
Of the Indigenous people that I have worked with - just the kind of way that appointments
are set up, attending at a scheduled time, that hasn’t always worked well I don’t think. I think
for that population perhaps it needs to be a little more open and flexible on an as needs
basis. So that when things arise there’s somebody there to talk to, not having to book in an
appointment a week later or something like that (Psychologist)
During interviews, staff suggested a number of measures that could improve the engagement of
Aboriginal young people. Suggestions included to:
• provide training to non-Indigenous staff to implement culturally appropriate engagement and
treatment practices
• employ more Aboriginal practitioners in centres
• make connections and build relationships with Aboriginal organisations, Aboriginal workers,
and key figures in local Aboriginal communities
• offer different forms of outreach that ‘take the service out to them’
• provide more flexible services that do not follow a rigid, place-based, time allocated, clinical
model, but rather are flexible, non-threatening model based on the needs and lives of
Aboriginal young people.
A third of interviewed staff felt that headspace needed to improve engagement practices with
Aboriginal young people. Most of these staff spoke of the goodwill of centre staff to think creatively
and suggest ways to better engage local Aboriginal young people. However, it was clear that the
pressures of work restricted the enactment of these ideas.
CALD young people were found to be under-represented in the first evaluation of headspace (Muir
Social Policy Research Centre 2015
headspace Evaluation Final Report
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