CANVAS: Collaborative Networks of the Victorian Mental Health Service System (PILOT)

Project background

CANVAS is a relational service mapping project. It is a pilot project run in collaboration between the Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing and the University of Melbourne. The aim of CANVAS is to gather information on all mental health services in two study areas: the Western Metro area of Melbourne, and the Hume Region in NE Victoria.

CANVAS, however, is unique. It focuses not just on services themselves, but on how services are connected to each other, and to other sectors. Using social network analysis, this approach emphasises organisation-to-organisation links like the following:

• Referral pathways, service agreements
• Connections to other sectors (e.g., AOD)
• Collaboration in various forms
• Wished-for collaborations

By mapping these relationships, we can get a systematic birds-eye-view on services are integrated. This allows us to understand how the system operates collectively, how the service system differs across regions, and how the system is connected to other sectors.
As part of the pilot phase of the project, we will ask Local, Area, and State mental health services who serve the Hume and Western Metro areas to provide information on their services and their partners. As part of this, we will collect information on how they collaborate, including:

• Connections between mental health services, and
• Connections to other services (e.g., AOD, Family Violence, Legal, CALD, Indigenous, etc)

The resulting map and analyses will provide a baseline view of the state’s current network of mental health service providers.  This baseline view will inform an understanding of the existing state of the network, including its referral pathways and areas of effective collaboration and will also suggest opportunities for improving referral and collaborative activity.

Responsible Researcher

Dr Colin Gallagher
Tel: +61 3 8344 0042

Email: colin.gallagher@unimelb.edu.au | canvas-project@unimelb.edu.au

CANVAS team:

• Dr Dan Chamberlain
• Dr Tegan Podubinski
• Ms Robyn Molyneaux
• Dr James Coutinho
• Prof Phillippa Pattison
• Prof Garry Robins
• Dr Daniel Russo-Batterham
• Ms Robyn McNeil
• Dr Emily Hanscamp (the Collaborative Centre)
• Dr Katie Jones (the Collaborative Centre)
• Professor Sarah Wilson (the Collaborative Centre)