Outcomes Monitoring Presented to the Australian Government Productivity Commission's Public hearing on Mental Health

9:45 Proceedings commence This Mental Health inquiry public hearing in Melbourne provided people with the opportunity to elaborate on their submissions, respond to submissions of others, and to discuss their ideas and issues with our Commissioners. This hearing ran from 8.30am AEDT yesterday and concluded at 3.30pm AEDT.

Julian McNally shares his clinic's experience with outcomes monitoring via ACORN, and makes the argument that outcomes monitoring should be implemented across the field.

These comments were presented to the Australian Government Productivity Commission's Public hearing on Mental Health in Australia.

What they achieved:

- Greater improvement on average per client

- Longer client engagement in treatment (an average of 5 assessments, up from 4.3)

- A longer treatment period (12.3 up from 10.6 weeks,) Longer treatment period is correlated with a lower drop out rate

- A 50% higher rate of improvement per week

- More improvement per session

- A greater proportion of clients improving (73% up from 68% of clients)

- Lower proportion of severely deteriorating clients (4% compared to 6% ACORN user average)

Keep up the excellent work!

Julian is a counseling psychologist at Act of Living, located in Northcote, Victoria, Australia.