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Partners in Recovery: information session video, part 3 - comments from the panel, questions and answers

Comments about Partners in Recovery (PIR), and questions and answers, as presented at an information session.

Video - part 3 of information session
Transcript - part 3 of information session

Transcript

Comments from the panel

PIR Expert Reference Group members, state/territory government mental health representative

Carla Cranny: Now is the opportunity for you to reflect back and ask questions of members of our panel.

But before I invite you to do that, I’d like to ask members of the expert reference group to comment on the Partners in Recovery initiative, problems it’s likely to address and what they hope it’s likely to achieve. So, could I invite Alison Ritter to comment first please?

Alison Ritter: Thanks very much. I think everyone knows what the problem is about people falling through the gaps, services not being well coordinated and from a drug and alcohol perspective, I think probably the 24,000 people that are the target group for this initiative, have at some point accessed a drug and alcohol service, and from drug and alcohol services point of view, the problem has been that clients are bounced between drug and alcohol and mental health - there’s no coordination. The client might fail to attend after a couple of sessions. The alcohol and drug service has no way of locating that client; they don’t know that they’ve necessarily been well picked up by a mental health service and so on. So, really, this initiative is about trying to coordinate the care for that person over a long period of time, not just in an immediate episode, but over the course of some appropriate period of time.

Carla Cranny: Janet Meagher; you’ve used mental health services; you understand very much the situation of people with severe and persistent illness. What do you hope that Partners in Recovery will achieve?

Janet Meagher, PIR Expert Reference Group member: Well, I hope it helps us recognise those people who fall away from our services for various reasons, usually their own conflict and that we’ll be able to pick up those people again and help them move towards recovery. We’re not talking about the nice consumers generally. We’re talking about people with very complex social and emotional difficulties and often, people who don’t recognise that it’s a mental health problem underlying their plethora of social problems and their disassociation sometimes with our communities.Top of page

Carla Cranny: Thank you, Janet. And lastly, Karen Price from the Ministry of Health.

Karen Price, NSW Mental Health and Drug & Alcohol Office: Thank you. Yeah, I think Partners in Recovery’s a significant opportunity for us all and the additional resources are welcome. I think relationships and the system navigation and the value-add, all probably come through really good and solid efforts at understanding the local pressures, the local resources and working together to try and address those challenges that already exist and will exist when this initiative kick off.

Questions/comments

Carla Cranny: I think we’ve had a good overview and a large set of aspirations and some things to watch out for to stimulate your questions, so now it’s your turn.

Natalie Healey: My name’s Natalie Healey; I’m representing Inner West Sydney Medicare Local. I’m a mental health nurse and I’m just interested to know what your vision is around the support facilitators? Who might that be and where might they sit?

Carmen Hinkley: So, the guidelines talk about the role of a support facilitator as being, I guess, the day to day people doing the system level collaboration and the contact with clients. We’ve been deliberately silent, again, on any qualifications or training that the support facilitators might have and that’s because we want to allow as much flexibility as possible within the models that regions are proposing, to make sure that the skills and qualifications match what’s needed. So, I think we talk about them being appropriately skilled and experienced, but we certainly would envisage them to have some core skills, you know, like a good understanding of the mental health needs within that region. They’d need to be good communicators and networkers and those sorts of, you know, embody those recovery sort of skills. It might be that the support facilitators are actually based within the PIR organisation or there might be models recognising that some regions are quite large that support facilitators are, sort of, out-posted around the region. So, there’s certainly flexibility for that.

Desley Casey: Good morning, Desley Casey from CAN Mental Health and I was wondering whether the Partners in Recovery are developing a minimum data set for the data collection overall, or are you just giving guidelines on what data you want collected as part of the evaluation component?

Alison Ritter: The evaluation design has yet to be finalised and the tendering process is still active, but yes, there will be a core set of data that will need to be collected by PIR organisations in order to inform, both service monitoring, as well as the overall evaluation.Top of page

Jessie Dumphey: Hi, my name’s Jessie Dumphey. I’m a peer support worker and I also work within the Service Development Team at Neami. Just thinking about referral pathways and thinking about some of the difficulties we’ve had around, sort of, the term ‘serious mental illness’ and I just wondered, you know, whether there will be a clear definition around the idea of this being for people with a severe degree and persistent, how we’ll clarify that in terms of referrals?

Janet Meagher: If you check the website, they refer to a document that was produced by the National Mental Health Consumer Carer Forum, which is entitled ‘Unraveling Psychosocial Disability’ and it doesn’t come up with the definition, because the definition is in the individual. The individual, you know, you could live with a serious and persistent mental illness and be quite productive and not truly have a psychosocial disability, and someone with an equivalent disorder could be absolutely, totally socially dysfunctional, personally dysfunctional and physically unable to manage their affairs. So, it is one of those areas where expertise is in the interpretation of the individual.

Jessie Dumphey: How self-directed is it aimed that the PIR action plans will be, in terms of working with people?

Sue Campion: The answer is very. It’s envisaged that the support facilitator will sit with the client, their family and carer, if they’re available, as well as partner organisations if possible and work through what the needs are. The partner organisations may not necessarily all be there or any of them maybe there at the time, and then the role of the support facilitator would be then to go away and negotiate with them about what services they can provide – when and how and what have you – but it is envisaged very much that the client is at the centre of this and has to be involved in the decisions about what they need and as I said, in the presentation it is envisaged that they would also sign the action plan and get a copy.

Michael Mittwollen: Hi, Michael Mittwollen from Anglicare South Western Sydney. With the funding that’s allocated to a region does the department have an idea or a proportion that it would allocate from that total amount of funding for organisations to use for those types of services?

Sue Campion: We’ll go through the funding in the next session but the funding is split into two types. There’s one-off funding which is just to establish your organisation and the remainder of the funding is the recurrent funding to support the operations of the organisation and we don’t specify at the moment what proportion of that operational funding should comprise the flexible funding but we are in the process of thinking about how we might give some further guidance about that in the invitation to apply documentation.Top of page

Jenna Bateman: Jenna Bateman, Mental Health Coordinating Council New South Wales. My question is one about the National Disability Insurance Scheme and how these two programs dovetail, particularly I guess I hear the terminology of support facilitator and I’m aware that that’s also a role within the NDIS when it rolls out, and the target group is similar at least part of what is envisaged to target under the NDIS. And I just wondered if there was some thought around that?

Janet Meagher: Actually it’s a good question because it is a similar target group and my vision for this is that part of the coordination would be to coordinate with disability support services and to facilitate access to broader supports if necessary via the NDIS.