We know that being able to get in touch with your treating team or health professional easily is important and many people prefer to be able to make contact online or on text message.

We are reviewing how our Mental Health, Drug and Alcohol staff make contact with people who are using our services. In particular, we are looking at how we use text messages (SMS) to get in touch.

It's really important that we know what people using our services prefer and think, about different ways of communicating with us, so we are asking for your opinions on texting as part of our services.

We value your perspectives. During April 2022, we invited the community to share their experiences and preferences around communicating with your care team.

This information will help us to develop clear guidance for all Mental Health, Drug and Alcohol staff on when and how to use text messaging to communicate with people accessing our services.

If you have questions about this topic or would like to share your thoughts, please get in touch with us on mlhd-mhda-experiences@health.nsw.gov.au

Thank you to all those who took the time to tell us about their experiences and preferences with using SMS to communicate with your treating team.

Here are some of the things we heard:

• Most people we heard from (60%) find text message a useful way to communicate with their treating team, particularly if they have a quick question about something
• Communicating by text message can feel less scary or overwhelming than making a phone call
• It is important to still have the opportunity to have a proper conversation with the treating team and text messages do not replace that kind of interaction
• Most people that we heard from (70%) would like Mental Health, Drug and Alcohol services to contact them by text messages more often. Only 10% would like this to happen less.
• Appointment reminders by text message were seen as very useful by most people we heard from (80%)
• Other reasons people told us they would like to be contacted by text message were to check-in on their wellbeing or respond to them when they are feeling distressed.

This is really useful for us to know, thank you to all who took part!

We are combining what we heard from people who access Mental Health, Drug and Alcohol services with what we heard from staff to create a guideline document.

This guideline document will let staff know how they can use text messaging safely and effectively to communicate with people using our services, in a way that works for them.

We are also reviewing our processes around text messaging to make this more efficient and consistent across our services.

With this, we hope that it will become easier for you to contact your care team in the way you want.