A five-year research partnership between the University of Canberra (UC) and Lifeline Australia has been announced to deliver valuable insights and knowledge to improve the crisis support service.
The project, which has received a $1.1 million Partnership Program grant from the National Health and Medical Research Council and more than $2 million cash and in-kind support from stakeholders in the crisis service industry, will build on previous work to fine tune Lifeline’s service delivery.
Professor of Psychology at UC, Debra Rickwood (pictured), who will lead the project, said it aims to add a reliable and continuing set of measures to the effectiveness of the organisation’s services.
She said Lifeline is Australia’s only national 24-hour crisis service and a central component of the mental health and social care systems in the country.
Professor Rickwood said it was relied on as the out-of-hours community “safety net” by more than one million people each year.
She said the multidisciplinary team would look at users’ expectations, innovative approaches, and outcomes for Lifeline and other services, which are frequently accessed by people who require crisis support and help in suicide prevention.
“Given the increasingly widespread reliance on Lifeline for universally accessible and free support for people in emotional crisis and those who are suicidal, our research will look into identifying the types of help-seekers that such crisis services are expected to support, and the outcomes expected to be achieved,” Professor Rickwood said.
“We want to better understand who is seeking help, if the responses are adequate or helpful, and what do the callers expect to achieve when calling these services.”
She said Lifeline had also moved into the digital age, offering crisis support via online chat and text messaging, so it was timely that expectations and outcomes from these new areas were explored.
“The research will include the highly innovative design of automated artificial intelligence algorithms to identify different types of help-seekers and their outcomes,” Professor Rickwood said.
