Child & Adolescent Mental Health Conference

Abstract

There has been an increasing trend in demand for services for young people with an eating disorder for many years. This trend was amplified by COVID-19 impacts in 2020, creating
unprecedented levels of demand that was unable to be immediately accommodated by existing services at Children’s Health Queensland (CHQ). In response to this, the Eating Disorders Steering Committee was established and a program of work undertaken to understand how CHQ could improve what we had to offer these young people, their families and the staff who work tirelessly in this area. This co-design work is part of the larger reform initiative. CHQ is committed to learning from those who use its services and is interested in working in partnership with industry experts in developing a toolkit or framework to foster this opportunity to work with young people with lived experience to deliver effective service improvement. The project engages co-design and participatory design methods to utilise the perspective and insight of young people to generate strategies for the development of media, services and designs to assist young people in their treatment and recovery from an eating disorder. The project investigates the current experience of services supporting young people with eating disorders, and how we can design resources and approaches to support them for as positive experiences as possible. It consists of two sequential workshops and a follow-up asynchronous co-design activity. In the workshops, participants will co-create characters – or personas – that represent young people and describe what services the characters might use and the types of positive and sometimes negative experiences they may have using them. Participants will then explore, through further creative co-design methods, the ways these characters can be better supported, producing a series of prototypes and recommendations for future low-cost implementation.