Up to 75% of mental health disorders emerge before the age of 25, however, the majority of young people who need mental health services do not access them (Kessler et al., 2005). Young people value technology, and in particular, rely on internet-enabled platforms for communication and information access – this includes health information. eHealth holds much promise for increasing youth engagement and outcomes by improving access, reducing costs and increasing interactivity (Burns et.at., 2010). National Australian policies endorse the role of eHealth to complement traditional mental health service delivery however; limited examples of leveraging technology to engage youth clients exist. In 2014, the newly established Youth Mental Health Services (YMHS) at Country Health South Australia teamed with Flinders University’s ‘Young and Well Towns’ (YAWT) research project to explore ways to integrate consumer centric technologies in service delivery. This process has entailed consultation, training and the provision of key staff with iPad’s to facilitate the use of technology in standard practice. This presentation will discuss underlying psychological factors associated with behaviour change in relation to technology uptake in youth mental health services, and detail case studies of successful of practice change.

Background: People with mental illness typically die 20 years earlier than the general population, largely due to smoking-related diseases1. Many smokers with mental illness want to quit or reduce their smoking2, but mental health services often lack the resources or skills to provide intensive smoking care.
Aim: To describe how Victoria’s Quitline tailors its callback service to meet the needs of people living with mental illness, and how effective it is in helping people with mental illness to quit or reduce their smoking.
Methods and Results: A Quitline evaluation telephone survey (recruitment October 2013-April 2014) contacted 704 smokers using the service. One third (229 clients) reported a mental health condition. The large majority of primary diagnoses were for anxiety or depressive disorders (169 clients). Only 53 clients (8%) reported being diagnosed with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Sustained abstinence rates (defined as quit for 5 months or more at 6-month follow-up) were lower, but considerable, among people with mental illness (15% vs 26% among those without a mental illness (X2(1,534)=9.30, p=.002), and were similar across diagnoses.
Conclusion Quitline is an effective but under-utilised resource for smokers with mental illness. Mental health services should try to refer smokers to Quitline more often.

St Vincent’s Mental Health (Melbourne) in collaboration with other mental health services and NGO has developed an appropriate framework and contents of aSMILE (a Statewide Mental Illness Learning Exchange) web-based portal and smart phone application for people with mental illness in Victoria. It is a holistic, equitable, accessible, and consumer/carer/clinician – driven web-based portal that will provide an initial ‘one-stop-shop’ with appropriate links to specific reputable mental health websites to users. It will be a distinctive and trustworthy service portal that is able to function in parallel with government schemes and services in Mental Health Promotion within Australian society.

This English version of aSMILE will also provide an opportunity for translation into other languages to meet the need of CALD mental health users, who due to language barrier and stigmatisation find internet or smart phone access may be applicable resources for them. There is scope for collaboration to extend to other states.
This paper will illustrate an in depth overview of the completed aSMILE resources. It also provides excellent opportunity for valuable feedback and input from different stakeholders/user groups such as consumers, carers, friends, mental health clinicians throughout Australia.

Since March 2014 Mary O’Hagan has been working with a team of IT experts and start-up business advisors to validate the market for an online and paper-based recovery activity and resource centre for international use. The market validation has shown that Swell will fill a need. The proposed platform is without precedent and has the potential to be a powerful solution to a set of inter-related problems that affect mental health and addiction service users and service workers.

The team is starting on the phased build of an online mobile app (for phones, tablets and PCs) and paper based (PDF) recovery toolkit for people who use mental health and addiction services and the people who work with them – to use collaboratively or independently of each other. Our vision is that service workers will be able to access best practice information on resolving common recovery challenges and use the app to communicate with service users and share work issues with their colleagues. Service users will be able to access information independently, complete activities to explore and resolve their challenges, and store and share their activity data.

The talk covers the journey of the development of Swell this far...