Transcultural clinical consultation service

Any mental health care service you use should consider your cultural background. The Queensland Transcultural Mental Health Centre (QTMHC) offers free mental health services for people from non-English speaking backgrounds.

You can contact us if you want help with a mental health issue for you or a family member or friend. We can talk about how we can help and connect you with services. The service is confidential.

How we help

Our service has bilingual and bicultural doctors, nurses, allied health workers and transcultural clinical specialists who can help you with complex mental health problems. We can:

assist with co-assessments

provide diagnostic clarification

talk about mental health and illness the same way other people with your cultural background do

look at how your cultural background impacts your mental health

consider your cultural needs when we suggest treatment

talk to and teach patient families and community leaders about mental health

provide referral options for community services and support

facilitate access to public mental health services.

Levels of consultation

We provide 3 levels of consultation for transcultural mental health services.

Primary consultation

We make direct contact with the patient and their family (your consent required).

A transcultural mental health clinician, cultural consultant or interpreter sees the patient.

We negotiate with the principal service provider (PSP) from the treating team to determine if it would be helpful for them to participate in planning or conducting the session.

If patient consent is not provided for primary consultation, we can still provide secondary and tertiary consultation.

Primary consultation interventions may include:

socio-cultural assessment—this is usually conducted by a senior transcultural mental health clinician, often with a bicultural worker that shares the patient’s cultural, linguistic and religious background. Cultural formulation (the gathered culturally relevant information) and recommendations are provided to the treating team

diagnostic clarification—this may require psychiatric review with the QTMHC consultant psychiatrist

delivery of culturally responsive psychoeducation (with the patient and family, often led by the PSP with the involvement of a bicultural worker)

short-term assistance to aid access to and improve engagement with a mental health service, coordinated by a transcultural mental health clinician with support from a cultural consultant.

Secondary consultation

We provide input or advice to the treating team (patient consent not required).

No direct contact is made with the patient or family.

We may provide specific cultural advice after consulting with a bicultural worker (if required and depending on cultural consultant availability) and may recommend engagement strategies, how to increase cultural safety, and how to discuss sensitive topics, such as suicide and family dynamics.

Tertiary consultation

Tertiary consultation is not patient-specific.

We provide general advice to the referrer about culturally responsive practice and service delivery.

We provide referral options—for example, contact details for private practitioners from the same cultural background as the patient, or culturally responsive NGOs or community agencies that support culturally and linguistically diverse patients).

Resources and tools are provided to the referrer to support transcultural mental health practices (e.g. cultural formulation guide, translated mental health information or discipline-specific culturally appropriate assessments and interventions).

We provide advice about how to access or work with interpreters.

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