No abstract

No abstract

Young people experience high rates of mental health problems, but very few access professional mental health support. To address the barriers young people face in accessing mental health services, there is growing recognition of the importance of ensuring services are youth-friendly. Indeed, almost a decade ago, the World Health Organisation developed a youth-friendly framework for services to apply. Yet, this framework has rarely been evaluated against health initiatives for young people. This article begins to address this gap. Using 168 semi-structured, qualitative interviews with young service users, this paper explores the extent to which the Australian National Youth Mental Health Foundation, also called headspace, applied the WHO's youth-friendly framework which emphasises accessibility, acceptability and appropriateness (AAA). It argues that headspace was largely successful in implementing an AAA youth-friendly service and provides evidence of the importance of tailoring services to ensure they are accessible, acceptable and appropriate for young people. However, it also raises questions about what youth-friendly service provision means for different young people at different times. The findings suggest that youth friendliness should be applied across different stages of interaction (at initial engagement and in the ongoing relationship between patient and clinician) and at different levels (the environment the care is provided in, within policies and procedures and within and between relationships from receptionists to clinicians).

Families with children with disabilities are at higher risk of stress, financial disadvantage and breakdown. In recent decades, research and policy have shifted focus from these problems to a strengths-based approach, using concepts such as family resilience. By definition, resilience is the ability to cope in adverse circumstances, suggesting a reliance on the individual. If this is the case, then to what extent does 'family resilience' place another burden of responsibility onto families? Whose responsibility is family resilience? This paper begins to answer this question using interviews with parents of children with developmental disabilities based in New South Wales, Australia.

Around one in five people in developed countries are ‘financially excluded’. But how meaningful is this when the current definition does not differentiate between those who choose to be excluded and those who are forced to be? This conceptual paper draws on frameworks from social exclusion, resilience and ecological systems theory to critique the current definition of financial exclusion and to introduce an alternative concept. The paper argues that the emphasis of extant literature on an access-point approach has isolated the context surrounding financial exclusion and contributed to simplifying the phenomenon. It puts forward the need for a change in the way financial exclusion is conceptualised in developed countries to take broader contextual settings and a more holistic approach into account and it suggests that a shift to financial resilience may be a way forward.