Dr Kathryn Turner, Executive Director, Metro North Mental Health
Welcome to the first MNMH Bulletin of 2022. It has been a challenging start to the year, and I would like to thank you all for your hard work during this period. As we start to wind back some of the COVID-19 response you will see our service return to business-as-usual, which includes some revamped Safety and Quality work.
Despite the challenges I know that there continues to be a focus on quality and innovation across our service. This has also been a focus for the leadership team of MNMH. Late last year, just before the surge in COVID, the Executive Leadership team of MNMH managed to put aside a day to come together to reflect on where we would like to see the service moving, and what priorities we would like to focus on in the year ahead. This included reflection on the challenges and frustrations of the system as well as lots of ideas for improvements.
Placing consumers and carers at the centred of all we do; aspiring to generous and compassionate leadership; supporting staff to be engaged, skilled, confident and opportunities to work at the top of their scope; excellence in clinical care, education and research; more holistic care for consumers including more integrated approaches to mental health, substance use and physical health issues; and both breaking down internal silos and developing increased external partnerships and regional approaches to providing the best care to serve our community were all agreed aspirations for our service.
To achieve that, the specific outcomes of this planning day included reviewing our recruitment processes to reduce unnecessary layers of bureaucracy; reviewing meetings to ensure alignment with achieving our goals, and more productive meetings; more engagement with budget planning processes; commitment to progressing the ASPIRES strategy for Suicide and Overdose prevention; a commitment to developing a Restorative Just Culture; more integrated approaches to mental health and substance use disorders; development of a Crisis Reform Strategy; and the development of a system and service improvement framework that integrates consumers, clinicians, leaders, community, educators and researchers in a connected approach to service development, implementation, evaluation and ongoing improvement. This of course, is on top of all of our existing plans. So it’s quite an ambitious workplan, and we recognise that these will take time.
Conversations across the service have highlighted that some of our staff are concerned that our name ‘Metro North Mental Health’ is not inclusive of everything we represent. While there are advantages to it being succinct, some would argue that it does not adequately reflect all parts of our service. However, choosing an alternative is a challenge! We have recently asked you to provide your input via a survey, so watch this space.
We have a lot of exciting work that has continued quietly in the background while the focus was on the urgent COVID-19 response, and the floods, and I am looking forward to sharing with you all the progress on these programs in the coming updates.
2022 is shaping up to be an exciting year ahead!
Regards,
Dr Kathryn Turner
Executive Director
Metro North Mental Health