Assoc Professor Grant Blashki, Nossal Institute for Global Health, University of Melbourne Funding: PHCRED Research Fellow and APHCRI Stream Funding Team members: Greg Armstrong, Assoc Professor Lynette Joubert, Professor Jane Gunn, Dr Richard Moulding, Professor Robert Bland, Dr Lucio Naccarella

Many people with common mental illnesses, including anxiety and depression, find it difficult to access mental health care. Provision of primary care-based psychological therapies by allied health professionals such as social workers is one way to address this unmet need.

One of the first studies of its kind, this randomised controlled trial (RCT) evaluated the impact of training for social workers in Focused Psychological Strategies (FPS). It showed that with a brief  intervention social workers were up-skilled in delivering cognitive behavioural strategies.

This RCT – conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from social worker, GP, psychology and health services backgrounds – discovered that social workers' base set of skills allowed them to competently apply FPS once they had undertaken targeted training. Researchers found that a 15-hour face-to-face training program had a substantial and statistically significant effect on both subjective confidence and objective competence in video-taped simulated standardised patient consultations.

This research about primary care psychological interventions is highly relevant to Australian mental health policies, which in recent years have begun to fund social worker FPS for patients referred by their GP.