Dr Kathryn Turner, Executive Director, Metro North Mental Health

It’s been another challenging month, responding to the COVID surge on top of a number of other illnesses affecting staff and impacting on demand across the HHS. Once again it has been heartening to see the support everyone has been providing for one another within and across teams and across our various services. The numbers are now steadily improving, and we seem to be through the worst for now.

Although we had to put aside a number of meetings and activities as we responded to the surge, all of our leadership has been working hard in the background to progress the significant boost to staffing we received as part of the new Mental Health plan and recent Queensland budget. Some of the positions are only funded to commence later or at the end of the year. However, there has been a lot of work happening to plan for that in our mental health, AOD and state-wide services in order to get the most out of the funding.

Discussions are also underway to progress plans for new buildings in order to expand our number of beds. Future beds include Acute Older Persons, Young Adult, Eating Disorder, and short stay crisis beds. We are working within the larger HHS redevelopment programs and exploring exactly where these beds will be located.

In other news, four of our Metro North Mental Health staff recently graduated from the Graduate Certificate in Health Science (Health Services Innovation). I have been actively engaged in the program, developed by The Australian Centre for Health Services Innovation (AusHSI) at QUT, having taken residence as a panel member in the first semester’s shark-tank style pitch panel. Please see the below article for more information about our new graduates.

Thanks once again for your dedication and support for one another across this challenging time. We have ongoing excellent work happening across our Directorate and I look forward to highlighting some of the many excellent initiatives across the service that are improving the care we provide to consumers, clients and their families and carers.

Kind regards,

Kathryn