Tell us a little about yourself and what you do at the Bouverie Centre?
My name is Ellen Welsh. I’ve got a background in Engineering and I’m currently working at the Bouverie Centre as the Digital and Clinical Operations Coordinator. I’m also in the final stages of my PhD where I’m co-designing a website with resources for families – we’re calling this the “Family e-Hub”.
Can you tell us a bit more about the Family e-Hub?
The Family e-Hub will be a resource for families to come together or as individuals, to think about what’s going on for their family. It will help them find relevant information, collaborate a little, start conversations, and ultimately, access in-person support or referrals if that’s what they want or need, including to our Walk-In Together (WIT) clinic here at Bouverie. The intention is not that Family e-Hub will replace seeing a family therapist –we want to be able to provide families with quick, relevant support when they need it and when they can’t immediately access family therapy.
As far as we can tell, Bouverie is the first service in the world to build a Family e-Hub like this. Typically, digital mental health resources and websites are designed for individuals and are not relationally-oriented or specifically designed for multiple people to collaborate together. An intervention like this is uniquely complicated, and it has been a focus of my PhD to see how we can design this to make this a safe, effective resource for families.
How can we best understand what families actually want and need from a digital mental health intervention (the “Family e-Hub”)?
In the first study of my PhD (a Delphi study), families helped to design a survey that was shared with a panel of experts (e.g. families, therapists and digital mental health experience) – the results of this survey helped us to understand what everyone agreed were essential principles for developing an Family e-Hub. This included things like the need for informed choice, anonymity and privacy, accessibility, and support and connection.
I used this information to inform a series of co-design workshops where families shared in further detail what an Family e-Hub could or should look like, and how we could make it safe, accessible and engaging. They helped us to understand what the barriers to using a website like this might be. We also workshopped how people might want to interact with their family members on the website, and what some of the concerns might be that we need to address.
How does your research address safety and privacy challenges, particularly when multiple family members are using the same digital product?
This is a major challenge that my research has tried to address in developing the Family e-Hub. Coming from Bouverie’s embedded systemic perspective, we want to make sure we are offering a relationally-focused intervention, which means we want both individuals and family members to feel comfortable using the Family e-Hub, separately or together. We need to consider what kind of data can or shouldn’t be shared between participating family members - for example, if each participating family member fills in a questionnaire at the start of their engagement with the Family e-Hub, we may only share aggregated data with the family to summarise their perspective of the whole family’s needs and goals, to protect the privacy of each family member. We also need to consider how the algorithm will function – for example, if a young person accesses Family e-Hub content that suggests they are of certain sexual orientation, it would be imperative that this was not shared with the family in a way that could identify this and unintentionally ‘out’ them. It’s a balance between privacy and anonymity and helping family members to get content that is personal, relevant and safe for them. These are some of the questions families and other experts have helped us to workshop in our co-design sessions.
Does AI factor into a digital mental health intervention like the Family e-Hub?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) was something that came up in all of our conversations with people throughout the co-design process. There are lots of opinions on how or whether we should be using AI in something like an Family e-Hub. We want to be mindful of AI and its capacity to help families, and we acknowledge the fact that people are already using AI for therapeutic purposes. However, for us at this stage, the use of AI in an Family e-Hub would be too resource-intensive and would require a lot of clinical oversight to ensure it remained ethical and safe, and so, at least in these early stages, it will not be part of the Family e-Hub.
What do you see as the key next steps in developing and implementing a family-based digital mental health intervention?
My PhD is due to be submitted at the end of this year, and we are incredibly lucky to have received seed funding to develop a prototype of the Family e-Hub in the next year. We will continue to work on refining and implementing a pilot version of the Family e-Hub, which will be situated with Bouverie to begin with. As we evaluate and create an evidence-base for the Family e-Hub, we would ideally like to support other allied services who work with families to integrate something similar as a gateway into their own services, with a view that this can help other systemic issues like long wait lists – that is still a long way off at this stage, however we are very excited about the future of this project!
Interested in learning more?
Read our latest knowledge translation of Ellen's recent publication
Essential design principles for a family digital mental health intervention: A Delphi study
For more information about Ellen's publications, visit her La Trobe Scholar page.
