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Research > 'Brief Intervention' Project
Brief Mental Health Interventions in Primary Care: The co-ordination and evaluation of primary care mental health counselling initiative.
John Fitzgerald, Karma Galyer, & Juanita Ryan
Research Assistants: Julia Davis & T.J. Halliday
This project focussed on the coordination and evaluation of primary care mental health counselling initiatives. Prior to the project the Waikato PHO had been running a number of pilots in which counsellors and clinical psychologists had been working with some General Practitioners to provide brief interventions for primary care patients who were experiencing psychological difficulties. These pilots had gone well, meeting the needs of many who have been experiencing problems with depression, anxiety, stress, difficult relationships, life transitions, etc. These were patients who required some form of specialist support, but who would not meet the criteria for accessing specialist secondary mental health services, or who did not require that level of service. Such individuals may attend a consultation with their GP, often presenting with physical symptoms, but are really seeking advice about where to obtain assistance with a psychological non-medical problem. Waikato PHO was pleased with the results of their pilot projects and supported the Local Management Groups in their decision to make brief psychological/counselling interventions more widely available across the Waikato region. So, from July 2006 the PHO engaged The Psychology Centre to coordinate and evaluate a much more widespread and comprehensive trial involving approximately 40 counsellors and psychologists working with over 200 GPs.
This project has now been completed with the final report being submitted to Waikato PHO. While we cannot release the full document we have prepared a summary of the project findings and the main recommendations. You can view this summary if you click here. We have also made available a number of the documents that we used during the project, these can be found further down this page.
We are continuing to work with the Waikato PHO and the Leading Edge Foundation to develop further the provision and evaluation of mental health services within the primary care sector. This provides an excellent opportunity for the Centre and the profession to explore its role within primary care mental health and will certainly provide opportunity for the development of practice innovations. A further area for exploration will certainly include the interface between primary and secondary services, reflecting the development of this focus in Australia and the UK.
Three presentations based on this project are planned for the 2007 annual conference of the New Zealand Psychological Society, to be held in Hamilton. They are part of a symposium entitled “Psychology and Primary Health Care”.
We have had one paper about the project published in a peer reviewed journal, and two further papers are in preparation.
Davis, J., Galyer, K., Halliday, T.J., Fitzgerald, J. M., & Ryan, J. (2008). Identifying psychological distress in New Zealand primary care: The General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12) as a screening instrument. New Zealand Family Physician, 35(2), 86-90.
Links:
Waikato Primary Health Organisation
Leading Edge Foundation