Youth specialist care centres mapping

Framing context

In the wake of the Victorian Royal Commission into Mental Health, the state government committed to developing a new tier of specialist youth mental health support, called the Youth Specialist Care Centres.

The Royal Commission identified a significant "missing middle" in the mental health system: young people whose needs are too complex or acute for primary care services like headspace, but who do not require inpatient hospital admission. This cohort has historically fallen through the gaps, cycling between emergency departments, brief hospital stays, and community services that lack the intensity or specialisation to genuinely support them.

The co-desgin process

The YSCC model is designed for young people roughly aged 15–25 experiencing complex or serious mental health challenges. The model moves deliberately away from a purely clinical, diagnostic framework toward something more person-centred and flexible.

Orygen is the leading youth mental health research and clinical organisation in Australia and oversaw the development of the model of care. Lively Collective, a lived-experience-led organisation, has been engaged to lead the co-design consultation process, ensuring that the voices of young people, families, carers, and supporters directly shape how the model is designed and refined.

The consultation run across multiple rounds:

Round 1: Exploratory workshops with young people and with families/carers separately, focused on what the ideal journey into and through a YSCC should feel like, and what support should look like at each stage
Round 2: Validation workshops reviewing the draft consultation summary and draft journey maps, checking whether themes were accurately captured, identifying gaps, and deepening the detail, particularly around specific contexts (First Nations people, trauma histories, culturally diverse backgrounds, families with complex dynamics)

Workshops summary

Key Tensions the Project Is Navigating

The missing middle is real and urgent. Young people in this cohort are often in significant distress, and the current system regularly fails them.

The system has promised reform before. Several participants with long experience as carers or advocates noted that many of the themes in the model of care have been proposed in previous reform cycles.

Families are not an add-on. Across both workshops, one of the strongest consistent messages was that families, carers, and supporters are inadequately centred in the current draft.

Non-linearity is the reality. The journey map risks implying a neat progression that doesn't reflect lived experience. Young people disengage, relapse, age out, re-present in crisis, and move between services.

Cultural safety is more than matching. For First Nations young people and those from culturally diverse backgrounds, genuine cultural safety goes deeper than assigning a worker with a shared background.

Insights & Journey mapping

The journey map being developed is a central design artefact for the Model of Care. Mapping the stages from first awareness of the service through referral, engagement, ongoing support, and eventual transition out, with touchpoints, supports, and emotional considerations at each stage.

Context-specific overlays (such as the First Nations and trauma overlay) are being developed to sit alongside the main journey map, ensuring the model can flex to meet the needs of young people whose experiences require a different approach.

Follow up workshops & feedback

The second round of workshops were used to validate our understanding and early mapping, creatine activities for the young people to critique and add critical nuance to the context layers, which will inform the model of care and service touchpoints.

The final journey maps

The final journey maps brought together touchpoints, relationships and opportunities for the service to create great experiences for young people struggling with complex mental health challenges.