The active involvement of consumers and carers in the development, planning, delivery and evaluation of services is a hallmark of a quality mental health system. Your Experience of Service (YES) is an annual survey collection designed to gather information about the experiences of care received by people accessing public mental health services in Queensland.
YES was developed in consultation with mental health consumers and carers and is based on the recovery standards in the 2010 National Standards for Mental Health Services. It includes a Family of Youth (FoY) survey which is directed towards parents, families or carers of children and adolescents accessing mental health services. Participation for these groups is voluntary and anonymous.
All Hospital and Health Services across Queensland participate in the YES collection, with the results communicated back to consumers and used by mental health services to identify areas for improvement, create action plans and implement quality improvement activities. The YES survey is available for completion in paper form in 24 languages and on tablet devices.
Framework
A framework has been developed to guide the collection, reporting and use of consumer and carer experience of service information. It is divided into four phases:
- Preparation – Hospital and Health Services are engaged to participate in the collection, resources are distributed, and education sessions are conducted
- Collection – surveys are offered by staff to mental health consumers, and collected for return to the Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drugs Branch (MHAODB).
- Analysis and reporting - survey results and reports are made available to Hospital and Health Services via the Integrated Mental Health Data Reporting Repository
- Planning for action – health services report results back to consumers, staff and the executive team, and use the results to create action plans for service improvements.
Mental health Carer Experience Survey
The mental health Carer Experience Survey (CES) was implemented across Queensland’s public mental health services from January 2019.
The survey is offered as a continuous collection to broaden the opportunity for carers to complete a survey.
The CES was developed as an action from the Fourth National Mental Health Plan (2009). The plan recognised carers and families should be actively engaged at all levels of policy and service development. In response, a national project was established to develop a tool to support mental health services to monitor and improve carer experience as part of an evidence informed quality improvement program. Implementation of the survey across mental health services is an action of the Fifth National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Plan (2017), and an action of Connecting Care to Recovery: A plan for Queensland state funded mental health services 2016–2021.
Implementation of the CES in Queensland commenced initially as a pilot collection across a small sample of Queensland public mental health services in 2017. An evaluation report was produced with a number of findings and recommendations made to support state wide implementation of the survey from January 2019.
