NZ’s Mental Health & Addictions Directory

18 months after the pilot, Healthpoint’s mental health and addictions directory was operating nationwide, featured 589 services and receiving over 40,000 page views per month. Each service had an active administrator and quality systems in place ensuring that service information was updated or approved every four months.

At the end of October 2018, 82% of all mental health and addiction services on Healthpoint had updated or approved their service information within the last four months.

Within 18 months, Healthpoint’s national mental health and addictions directory was a comprehensive, dynamic and future-proof resource with systems and oversight ensuring trustworthy and accurate information.

In late 2016 to early 2017, Healthpoint worked closely with Homecare Medical and Counties Manukau Health to design and develop a comprehensive, highly navigable mental health and addictions directory.

The co-design process involved Dr Lyndy Matthews – Clinical Lead at Homecare Medical, mental health and addictions call centre staff at Homecare Medical and the Clinical Director of Counties Manukau localities for mental health and addictions. Additional consultation was also carried out with provider arm mental health and addiction services and mental health nurse contractors.

This consultation process led to the development of a user-centric directory architecture. Directory navigation was designed that would allow users to search the directory in a number of ways including by location, programme type, age and referral methods accepted. These search navigations would return a list of services and the relevant programmes they offered matching the combination of search options used.

Service information and navigation at the programme level was essential in order to capture the complexity of mental health and addiction service delivery, as some organisations may offer ten or more programmes, all with different referral and eligibility criteria.

Following a successful pilot of the new directory architecture in Counties Manukau, Healthpoint expanded the directory to feature all mental health and addiction services nationwide, both NGO and DHB provider arm services.

Healthpoint engaged with mental health senior leadership at each DHB across New Zealand to understand the mental health and addiction service landscape and delivery in each region. Working with each DHB enabled Healthpoint to create another working list of services and contacts to cross reference and expand the database.

All mental health and addiction services featured on Healthpoint’s directory were engaged with directly to create comprehensive service profiles. Healthpoint worked with every mental health and addiction service to achieve this.

Service engagement would often involve conversations with multiple parties within an organisation including senior management, marketing and communications staff, clinical practitioners, team leaders and administrators. A tailored approach to profiling each service was essential to capture the complex nature of the mental health and addiction sector. The directory features services ranging from large national organisations to small rural drop-in centres, each with different referral processes, eligibility criteria and service delivery. Healthpoint has worked with each to ensure these aspects are represented in the best possible way to facilitate user understanding and access.

The engagement process also acted as an audit and quality method. Some services were identified as no longer operating or no longer holding mental health contracts and were removed from the directory. Others were identified as needing to be combined or separated due to service delivery or contractual factors.

During service engagement, each service is given editing access to their service profile, enabling them to make changes to their content at any time.

Healthpoint supports services to keep their information up-to-date through a quality assurance process. Services are prompted to review their Healthpoint profile on a four-monthly cycle and approve or update their information.

This quality system ensures that the Healthpoint mental health and addictions directory remains accurate and up-to-date and can be trusted by Homecare Medical staff and public users.

Since launching the national mental health and addictions directory, Healthpoint has continued to develop functionality to support Homecare Medical staff using the directory and to improve the experience of all users.

Homecare Medical now has a tailor-made homepage, accessible to those logged in via a Homecare Medical IP address. This homepage holds links to the most common search combinations on the mental health and addictions directory, enabling quicker, easier navigation around the directory.

In November 2018, Healthpoint improved the way services are displayed on search and refine pages. Users can now see a short one-line summary of each service on all search and refine pages and a phone number, if it is a service they can self-refer to. Services also show their operating hours and users can refine their search results to services ‘Open now.’

Healthpoint also continues to identify and engage with new services for inclusion in the directory.