Our member and Honorific President, Prof Luis Salvador-Carulla, Co-Deputy Director of the Health Research Institute and Honorary Professor of the School of Public Health, University of Canberra, and member of the CDRP, University of Sydney, has received the 2022 Tom Trauer Award for his contribution to mental health service research in Australia and internationally.
His multidisciplinary team at the Mental Health Policy Unit (originated at University of Sydney and now at University of Canberra) has developed a series of innovative tools to help decision making in mental health policy and planning. These tools include service classification systems, atlases of mental health care and computer-driven decision systems that have been adopted and used in 35 countries around the world.
DESDE ( “Description and Evaluation of Services and DirectoriEs”) is a tool to describe code services across sectors and for different target groups that has been used for developing local atlases of care in mental health, disabilities, social care, aged care, chronic care and other areas. It has been core to the development of a new approach to the analysis of the context of care to improve the implementation of interventions at local level. It allows international comparisons that have allowed, for example, the evaluation of services for mental health in remote areas of the world including Lapland (Finland), Nunavik (Canada) and the Kimberley (Western Australia).
The approach combining local information and global comparisons has provided a new framework for understanding complexity in health care under the GLOCAL project.
This international work has improved our understanding and evaluation of care in Australia.
Huge congrats, Luis!