Tricia Tan case study
Tricia Tan is a 2022 fellow from Singapore. Tricia is a medical student who decided to take a gap year to pursue an internship with the Singaporean Ministry of Health, to support the mental health of young people. Tricia is also the founder of Singapore’s first National Youth Advisory Group for mindline.sg, a government digital mental health initiative.
Identifying a need
By the time Tricia entered the fellowship, Tricia had identified that service fragmentation and lack of trust in public systems were prominent barriers to young people seeking mental health support in Singapore. Tricia had identified this problem through multiple consultations with young people in Singapore across 2021 and early 2022.
In response, Tricia’s proposal for change was based on adapting the headspace model (or integrated youth mental health service model) to the Singaporean context. The fellowship supported Tricia to develop deeper and wider connections with integrated youth mental health services around the world including @ease in the Netherlands and Orygen and headspace in Australia. Tricia also developed a close relationship with a senior headspace Australia manager through the fellowship’s expert mentoring.
Through these connections, Tricia had the opportunity to conduct site visits to Orygen and headspace in Melbourne, Australia in June 2022. The site visits supported Tricia to see and experience the integrated services in action, which informed the design and development of the key elements of a Singaporean service named d.well.
Launching d.well
The key elements of d.well were determined to be community activities, mental health, social service support, peer support, family support, career and education coaching and physical health.
The fellowship education and training modules also supported Tricia to explore her own story, perfect her pitch and speak confidently in any circumstance.
Following Tricia’s completion of the fellowship, Tricia has had the opportunity to pitch her d.well proposal to the Singaporean Ministry of Health. The ministry has officially accepted her proposal to start up d.well in Singapore and has allocated funding and a specific location for the first centre.
Through Tricia’s connection with Orygen Global, she has also had the opportunity to train other clinicians, academics and young people from around the world in youth mental health policymaking at the 2022 International Association of Youth Mental Health conference.