Overcoming Policy Implementation Challenges: A Guide for Students

1. Gaps and challenges:

What are some implementation gaps or challenges in your area of work or policy interest? In your view, what could be done to address one of these gaps?

Answer:

In the area of public mental health services, I have observed that access to indiscriminate and equal mental health services to marginalised or diverse communities in Australia is scarce, such as in the case of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who often face discrimination and inaccessible treatment to mental health services (Zhang et al., 2024). These gaps are due to the failure of the policies to effectively address the provision of health services to the public, barriers to access services and a lack of understanding of the unmet needs of the population. This is mainly due to the lack of understanding by policymakers, and service providers (Dudgeon et al., 2020). In my view, this issue can be addressed by using a bottom-up approach by involving Indigenous communities and street-level bureaucrats during policy and program designing and providing adequate training and governance to the service providers for policy implementation.