From 26 Jan to 2 Feb in 2020, Takashi Uchino and Yumi Kotsuji from Adachi site of MEICIS visited Orygen and headspace in Melbourne, Australia. “One-stop service,” which is an aim of our new centre for youth in Tokyo, SODA, has spread throughout Australia as a national policy. There are 111 face-to-face centres called “headspace” in Australia. Orygen is a research institution which manage and supervise the headspace centres and has a critical role for the national policy in terms of youth mental health.
They met many staff in Orygen and headspace including Prof. Patrick McGorry (Orygen, Executive Director) and learned a development of institutions and latest research. They also visited the headspace National Office, which manages operations of all headspace centres, and headspace Craigieburn, which is one of the centres located in the suburb in Melbourne.
In this visit, we obtained many suggestions for development of SODA and MEICIS, especially how we incorporate the concept of early intervention and clinical staging of mental health into the community-based integrated care system and how we use state-of-the-art technologies which are compatible with youth for the area of mental health. We would like to advance our research while fitting these suggestions into current situation in Japan.
