Early psychosis treatment and care are set to benefit from a major Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) grant that will enable the Australian Early Psychosis Collaborative Consortium (AEPCC) to roll out its world-first infrastructure in more clinical services across Australia.
The new $3 million MRFF grant will help AEPCC expand its Clinical Quality Registry (CQR) to up to 20 more early psychosis clinical services across all states and territories.
The CQR provides immediate benefits to patients, making it easier for clinicians to work with young people to chart progress and create summaries that are meaningful and useful for people experiencing psychosis and those who support them.
Professor Andrew Thompson, Head of Early Psychosis Research at Orygen, said the CQR is the first of its kind in mental health. It allows clinicians to work with patients to chart progress, identify what works and what doesn’t, and make treatment decisions together.
“We’ve seen clinical quality registries successfully used for decades in other areas of health, and AEPCC is proud to be the first to implement this approach in the youth mental health field,” Professor Thompson said.
“Psychosis is a drastically underfunded area of healthcare. As a comparison, around the same number of people are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year. Still, we are only halfway there in terms of understanding what helps people experiencing psychosis.“
“This much-needed grant will help us accelerate improvements to treatments and the care system by helping us better understand young people’s experiences and the treatments they find most effective.”
The CQR is a web-based application developed with input from the lived experience community to ensure that treatment summaries are meaningful and useful for people experiencing psychosis, their clinicians, and their supporters.
The MRFF funding will also enable linkages with other health datasets, enabling a more complete understanding of patient experiences and improved care.
The grant is part of the MRFF’s $650 million National Critical Research Infrastructure Initiative, which provides funding to establish and extend infrastructure (facilities, equipment, systems, and services) critical to conducting Australia’s health and medical research.
