MentalTAC

Development of Mental Health Triage App for Clinician

Background

Mental health is an on-going issue in Australia. The cause of mental health can be due to a variety of reasons; workplace culture, high workloads, job insecurity, disparity in pay, lack of career advancement opportunities and turnover intentions. Mental healthcare workers are not able to cope with it and are suffering from burnout (Scalan et al., 2020). Most hospitals will seek agency nurses to mitigate resource constraint but the skill sets required for the jobs are questionable. With the current COVID-19 pandemic, mental healthcare workers reported significant high levels of anxiety, depression and professional burnout (Northwood et al., 2021). Mental healthcare workers have to multitask between documentation work and attending to patients. This leads to inaccurate patient triage and missing important details during shift turnover leading to incorrect care being provided. Therefore, there is a need to ease mental healthcare workers workload and provide consistent patient triage with the help of technologies.

Goal

The project aim is to create a mobile app tool to ease mental health workers / nurses to perform triage when a mental health patient is admitted to the emergency department and all information recorded can be easily turnover to the next shift.

Method

This project will be developed using the software development life cycle framework. The project will have some basic information of the patient’s details, background of the patient’s mental health and details of treatment applied.

Project Lead

  • Jonny Low (Research Assistant, HumaniSE)
  • Agnes Haryanto (Research Fellow, Embodied Visualisation)

Students:

  • Alex Zhou
  • Andre Pham
  • Antony Loose
  • Dongzheng Wu
  • Joel Yang
  • Nabeeb Yusuf

Storyboard Snippet

Resources

Scalan, J. N., Still, M., Henkel, D., Heffernan, T., Farrugia, P., Isbester, J., & English, J. (2020). Workplace experiences of mental health consumer peer workers in New South Wales, Australia: a survey study exploring job satisfaction, burnout and turnover intention. BMC Psychiatry, 1-15. BMC. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-020-02688-9

Northwood, K., Siskind, D., & McArdle, P. (2021). An assessment of psychological distress and professional burnout in mental health professionals in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Australasian Psychiatry, 1/7. https://doi.org/10.1177/10398562211038906

Brown, A.-M., & Clarke, D. E. (2014). Reducing uncertainty in triaging mental health presentations: Examining triage decision-making. International emergency nursing, 22(1), 47-51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ienj.2013.01.005

Huckson, S. (2008). Implementation of the Victorian Emergency Department Mental Health Triage Tool. Australasian Emergency Nursing Journal, 11(2), 80-84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aenj.2008.02.007

Sands, N., Elsom, S., Berk, M., Hosking, J., Prematunga, R., & Gerdtz, M. (2014). Investigating the predictive validity of an emergency department mental health triage tool. Nursing & Health Sciences, 16(1), 11-18. https://doi.org/10.1111/nhs.12095

Watson, T., Tindall, R., Patrick, A., & Moylan, S. (2023). Mental health triage tools: A narrative review. International journal of mental health nursing, 32(2), 352-364. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.13073