Health and wellbeing
Partnering with health and mental health organisations to design services people actually turn to.

Partnering with health and mental health organisations to design services people actually turn to.

Portable has worked with leading mental health and health providers across Australia for nearly a decade, researching, designing, and building services that meet people at difficult moments. We take a trauma-responsive approach to every engagement in this space, whether that's supporting young Victorians' mental wellbeing, connecting people to headspace's services, or helping Cancer Council design a national navigation service for every person affected by cancer.

Grounded in almost 200 staff engagements and 28 community interviews, including with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, CALD and LGBTQIA+ communities, this service design brings nine independent state and territory Cancer Council organisations together under one evidence-based model. For people affected by cancer, that means consistent, culturally safe support regardless of which state or territory they live in.
For children and young people who've experienced self-harm or suicidal thoughts, and the families supporting them, we embedded lived-experience peer support directly into the new Child and Youth HOPE model of care at four participating health services. 24 carers, 20 young people, 7 children and dozens of clinicians helped design it rather than have it designed around them. That means a service shaped by people who've actually been through it. The work was awarded Gold at the 2022 Melbourne Design Awards.


We gave young Australians seeking mental health support, a group whose reported psychological distress has more than tripled since 2007, a single, consistent way to find and use headspace's services online, rather than a fragmented digital presence. For headspace, unifying that presence laid the foundation for later work like Spaces, extending their reach beyond direct clinician contact.
Collaboration is at the heart of all that Portable does. Let us know what you're working on and how you envision us partnering.