Dr Kathryn Turner, Executive Director, Metro North Mental Health

As 2022 draws to a close we reflect on what has been a busy and, at times, very challenging year, but with some great achievements along the way. We started the year in the midst of a COVID surge where we were required to keep learning and adapting to new challenges every day. The Directorate and all of the HHS came together resiliently, responding to these challenges with dedication and adaptability.

Further challenges came for our community, staff and service with the floods. Demands for our services and capacity issues have been a constant challenge throughout the year. Through all of this everyone has come together to support one another and ensure we remained focused on providing the best care for consumers, carers and the community we serve.

Staff wellbeing has remained a priority for us through these challenges and our staff wellbeing workstream for ASPIRES has worked on a range of initiatives. Wellbeing and workforce will be a major area of focus for us in 2023 and ongoing. We will communicate plans and opportunities for staff to help shape this early in the New Year.

The Mental Health Select Committee of the Qld Parliament looked at opportunities to improve mental health outcomes for Queenslanders. Many staff from across Metro North Mental Health actively contributed to submissions to this Committee. We also engaged at a state level to ensure that the needs of our community and service were clearly communicated in the lead up to the release of the Better Care Together Plan and its associated resources. As a result there are significant new resources coming into our service over the next five years. This will continue to keep us busy as we make the most of all of these opportunities and get new staff and services on board as quickly as possible.

Health Equity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is a major priority for our HHS and our service and we will increase our efforts into the New Year and beyond to work with our community to address inequities and improve outcomes for First Nations peoples.

We have had some wonderful achievements across the year in terms of improving clinical services and outcomes for our mental health and drug and alcohol services, research and building our lived experience workforce. Improving our information systems including developing an electronic mental health journey board and being one of the state’s pilot sites for discretionary locking of our acute inpatient units, have also been focuses. We will continue those and other important initiatives and build on them over the next year.

We are very excited that, due to the dedication of so many people across the service, we have nearly finalised the development of training for our ASPIRES Pathway for Suicide, Self-Harm and Overdose Prevention and will be rolling it out across the service from early next year. As part of ASPIRES, we made a commitment to improving culture across the service. Although only in its early days, we will continue to work with all staff, consumers and carers to embed a Restorative Just and Learning Culture across the service. So, 2023 promises to be an exciting year for the service.

I will be taking a month off over Christmas/New Year to spend time with my family. I am very grateful to Senthil Muthuswamy who will cover my position over that time. From all of the leadership team, we wish everyone a lovely festive season and hope that, even for the many of you who will be working across this time, you each get some time to spend with family and loved ones and an opportunity to refresh.

Kathryn