Source data: Community mental health care services 2019–20 tables (1.6MB XLSX).
Community mental health care service contacts can be conducted as either individual or group sessions. Service contacts can also be face-to-face, via telephone, or using other forms of direct communication such as video link. They can be conducted in the presence of the patient, with a third party, such as a carer or family member, and/or other professional or mental health worker.
The majority of service contacts reported in 2019–20 involved individual contact sessions (95.4%) and 4.6% of contacts were group sessions. More than half of all contacts were individual sessions (52.1%), where the patient participated in the service contact (termed patient present).
Target population
Services targeted toward the General population made up 69.6% of all treatment days in 2019–20 followed by Child and adolescent (15.0%), Older person (7.1%), Forensic (6.6%), and Youth services (1.7%). Services targeted towards Forensic, Older person, and Youth populations accounted for much smaller proportions of treatment days than the General population and Child and adolescent services. These results largely mirror the relative size (as measured by the number of full-time-equivalent staff) for each of the community mental health care service target population categories at (Specialised mental health care facilities section, Table FAC.41).
Duration of service contacts
The duration of community mental health care service contacts ranges from less than 5 minutes to over 3 hours. In 2019–20, the average service contact duration of sessions was 34 minutes. Nearly 4 in 10 contacts were 5–15 minutes in duration (38.9%, or 3.9 million) and almost 1 in 4 contacts were 16–30 minutes in duration (24.6%, or 2.5 million) (Figure CMHC.5). Service contacts with the patient present were on average twice as long in duration than service contacts where the patient was absent (average 44 and 22 minutes respectively).
Of the 5 most commonly reported principal diagnoses (Schizophrenia, Depressive episode, Bipolar affective disorders, Reaction to severe stress and adjustment disorders, and Schizoaffective disorders), Reaction to severe stress and adjustment disorders had the highest proportion of contacts lasting over 1 hour (13.6%).