MentalTAC: Mental Health Triage App for Clinician

Primary supervisor

Agnes Haryanto

Mental health is an ongoing 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 constraints, 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.

Student cohort

Single Semester
Double Semester

Aim/outline

The aim of the project is to explore the different approaches and tools available to assist mental health workers in providing effective patient care. Additionally, an evaluation will be carried out on a new mental health triage app that can be used when a mental health patient is admitted to the emergency department, ensuring that all the relevant information is recorded and can be easily handed over to the next shift.

URLs/references

MentalTAC project

Project information

Code repository

Watch the demo

References

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/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/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 [https://doi.org/10.1111/nhs.12095]. Nursing & Health Sciences, 16(1), 11-18. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/nhs.12095 

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

 

Required knowledge

  • Basic software engineering knowledge.
  • Interest in digital health and mental health.
  • Strong communication skills.