SERVICE DESIGN · 2025
Youth specialist care centres mapping
Working with Lively to bring young people’s voices into the emerging model of care for specialised mental health centres, overseen by Orygen.
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.
I was engaged by Lively Collective, a lived-experience-led organisation, to support the co-design consultation process, ensuring that the voices of young people, families, carers, and lead the journey and early service mapping.
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)
What I influenced:
The workshop questions: Many of the initial questions were good, but I wanted to push them to increase the chance of stronger insights. I did this by focusing on
Workshop activities: I added tweaks to the activities to improve the engagement from participants and help begin grouping data to make insight formation easier.
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
Key challenges
Coming into a context heavy area like youth mental health on a short turn around is always challenging, but these were the key ones to overcome:
- The client wasn't clear on whether the required mapping was to be a traditional journey map or a service blueprint, and so I developed something in-between. The mapping highlighted context specific insights from the workshop at each journey stage, tying into the model of care, but also had traditional experience elements.
- Translating over 30 qualitative and experiential data points into actionable design requirements & balancing them with delivery capabilities.
Follow up workshops & feedback
The second round of workshops were used to validate our understanding and early mapping, creating 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. They serve as a blueprint for service staff when the YSCCs eventually begin operation.
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.