Specially designed to educate the next generation of mental health professionals, the MindSpot Academy is set to welcome new recruits over the coming months and years into different roles and placement opportunities.  

In launching the new Academy, MindSpot Executive Director, Professor Nick Titov says investment in the training and education of Australia’s future digital mental health workforce is vital.

“Our vision is to build an emotionally resilient world and make mental healthcare accessible to all Australians,” he says. “To achieve the delivery of safe and effective care, we need to provide quality training and supervision.” 

The MindSpot Academy scope  

In the first year of operations, the MindSpot Academy will foster emerging talent through three pathways, which will initially target psychologists in training.  

First, the Clinical Registrar Program will take graduates of a Master of Clinical Psychology program through their registrar program. Second, psychologists completing the 5+1 pathway, can also complete their 6th year supervised practice period, with all supervision provided by MindSpot. Finally, MindSpot will continue hosting Clinical Psychology student placements, which it has a long history of doing, as part of their intern training.  Heading into the remainder of 2020, The Academy has already recruited five provisional psychologists, four registrars and six students.  

For more information on the training pathways and how to apply, visit the MindSpot Academy website. 

Future aspirations  

While the launch of these three formal learning and development pathways is a significant step, the Clinic team has bigger plans for the future of the Academy.  

MindSpot Clinic Director, Rheza Tan is excited to lead the new Academy and is looking forward to its growth in the years to come. 

“Our aspiration is to eventually build the MindSpot Academy into a trusted and well-regarded environment for mental health professionals to develop their clinical skills,” she says. “Eventually, we envisage offering various learning and development programs to mental health professionals in digital mental health and to share access to our tools and resources for use in their own practices.” 

Over seven years serving more than 140,000 Australians 

Since MindSpot’s inception in 2012, the clinic has served over 140,000 Australians. Funded by the Australian Government Department of Health, the clinic provides innovative digital mental health services including digital assessments and online treatment courses.  

Being government funded, the service is free to Australian adults and used by people across metropolitan and regional locations.  MindSpot employs a highly skilled workforce, including psychologists, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, occupational therapists, counsellors and mental health nurses.  

New study published in Lancet

MindSpot has also just published an internationally co-authored research paper in The Lancet, titled ‘User Characteristics and outcomes from a national digital mental health service: an observational study of registrants of the Australian MindSpot Clinic’, that illustrates the demographics and outcomes of MindSpot users over the first seven years of its clinic operations. 
 
It confirms the high uptake of MindSpot services by a broad range of people from across Australia, including traditionally hard to reach groups such as rural consumers and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. 

“The results demonstrate that services such as MindSpot have an important role to play in reducing barriers to care. Digital mental health services aren’t a panacea, but they are important components of contemporary mental health systems,” says Professor Titov.