Young people in chronic pain were waiting too long for the wrong door. We are configuring a faster, more personalised entry — with the people who will use it.
Chronic pain in adolescence is one of the highest-burden, lowest-recognised conditions in primary care. Most young people who present with it are routed toward tertiary services they may not need, while waiting months for the help they could have used immediately.
A young person presenting with persistent pain is typically referred to a tertiary chronic-pain service. Wait times stretch into months. While they wait, no structured self-management or primary-care support is offered. The implicit message: you wait for the specialist, and only then is your pain real.
But most young people with chronic pain would benefit from earlier, lighter-weight support — primary care plus structured self-management plus community resources — well before a specialist becomes necessary. The default routing assumes the highest-intensity service is the right one. It usually isn't.
The configuration question is: who notices the pain, who recognises the pattern, and where does the first decision land? Right now all three sit with a tertiary specialist — months away.
MyPath is being designed to surface the right care pathway at the moment a young person first reports persistent pain — with a clinician dashboard for rapid review and connected primary care, secondary care, or self-management support.
Pain was noticed only when a young person reached a clinical encounter — often months after symptoms began.
Consumer-driven self-report combined with digital intake means the system notices pain when the young person experiences it, not when they reach a specialist.
Pattern recognition was held by tertiary specialists, often after extensive history-taking. Most young people never reached this point.
AI-assisted triage surfaces likely pathway needs based on patient characteristics, history and presentation — visible to the GP or primary clinician at first contact.
Risk for escalation sat entirely with the tertiary specialist — and the patient, who waited.
Risk is distributed: GP holds early-stage care, specialist holds escalation risk, consumer holds self-management with structured support.
Care decisions waited for specialist input. Many young people received no formal care for months.
Personalised pathway recommendations land with the young person and their primary clinician at first contact, with onward referral as needed.
MyPath is in active co-design with Curtin University, primary-care clinicians, and consumer representatives. The configuration is being built and tested before any commitment to scale — exactly the Sandpit's remit.
The program emphasises consumer voice. Young people with lived experience of chronic pain are partners in the design, not subjects of it. Each iteration of the workflow is tested against real-world utility before moving forward.
MyPath is in co-design phase. Outcomes will be defined and measured against the configuration once it enters governed pilot.
When the four operations are decomposed properly, the question changes: not "how do we shorten the specialist wait list?" but "where should each piece of work actually sit?" Most of it doesn't belong with the specialist at all.
Each Sandpit configuration applies the same four-operation decomposition to a different capacity problem. What stays constant is the method.
Bring it to the Sandpit. We'll diagnose where capacity is lost, configure what should change, and test it in a governed live setting before you commit at scale.