New partnership with Smiling Mind empowering Aussies to take care of their mental health
We're excited to officially announce our Multi-Year Partnership with leading Australian mental health and mindfulness provider, Smiling Mind, encouraging Aussie adults to take just ten minutes out of their day to practice better mental health.
The three-year $750,000 partnership will support the development and delivery of the Building Healthy Habits for Healthy Minds home-based mindfulness meditation program.
With access to the program to be made available from the palm of your hand, Building Healthy Habits for Healthy Minds aims to empower Australian adults to take positive proactive action to look after their mental health every day.
The delivery of a free and accessible app that encourages individuals to take as little as ten minutes out of their day to focus on themselves, will not only help to normalise daily mindfulness based practice but will help Australians to develop an important and practical life skill to safeguard their health.
In a world-first, our funding support will enable Smiling Mind to conduct the largest evaluation of an app-based mindfulness intervention program - to measure the impact of their program on increasing the protective factors associated with mental health and wellbeing such as social connection, sleep quality, and developing personal coping skills and resilience to deal with the stresses of everyday life.
The evaluation will be conducted in partnership with University of Newcastle Associate Professor and leader in the field of mental health and eHealth program development and evaluation, Frances Kay-Lambkin. In addition the program will be integrated with Apple's i-Phone based research and data collection products.
With over 2 million people having already downloaded the Smiling Mind app, Building Health Habits for Healthy Minds provides a unique opportunity for greater understanding about the impact of such work. This will provide not only Smiling Mind but the entire mental health community, with much needed information about the effectiveness of such an intervention on participant wellbeing and stress, as well as the engagement in protective lifestyle factors such as sleep and physical activity.
The Building Healthy Habits for Healthy Minds program will be available to download in June 2018.
