Category: The MHS Conference

The Mental Health Services (TheMHS) Conference 2023

We’re delighted to share that VTMH had a larger presence at The Mental Health Services (TheMHS) Conference this year, with four submissions being accepted. These included two workshop sessions, a paper presentation and poster presentation. These touched on a variety of projects and themes VTMH has been involved in over the past year.

The two workshop presentations highlighted our Partners in Diversity Program and a recently released Community Engagement Resource.  The workshop, Embedding cultural responsiveness in a mental health service – addressing human rights through equity of access, was co-facilitated with the two partnership consultants from Better Health Network, who have been leading the Partners in Diversity work at their service.  TheMHS provided an excellent opportunity to showcase the work that VTMH and Better Health Network have been undertaking over the last three years to support organisational cultural responsiveness.

The second workshop, Engaging with community: Introducing a co-designed resource for workers to strengthen engagement with diverse communities, was focused on sharing a suite of new resources to support mental health practitioners and organisations to undertake community engagement work. The resources were produced as part of the two-year Community Engagement with Purpose Resource Project that had just been launched at the beginning of August 2023. The interest in the resource was evident given the number of audience members in attendance. The workshop featured a panel which included a number of Advisory Group Members who reflected and shared their knowledge and experience of working with communities around mental health and wellbeing.

VTMH also had the opportunity to present a paper entitled Dare to Care…Human Rights and Compassion in the Workplace. This paper aimed to address how education and training of the workforce could better support compassionate and rights-based services. Most importantly, how would the experience of people seeking support and wellness be improved? The session generated conversation about cultural safety and cultural humility and how sharing lived experience helps bring these ideas to life.

Finally, in collaboration with Headspace Dandenong/Hastings site, VTMH also submitted a poster for display entitled Improving cultural responsiveness: Reflections from a short-term localised project at a youth mental health service. The poster told the story of how the two services collaborated on a short-term pilot project, which aimed to explore and identify organisational cultural responsiveness learning gaps and considerations for addressing these.

Victorian Cultural Portfolio Holder Program at TheMHS 2018

The theme for this year’s conference was ‘Hear the whisper, not the roar: Reform, reflect and review’.

Kimberley Wriedt and Shehani De Silva from VTMH gave a 20 minute presentation titled ‘Responding to diversity: Supporting champions to drive change in a changing mental health landscape‘, which focused on the value of the role of cultural portfolio holders, and ways to sustain their momentum, particularly given current changes facing the model of service delivery in the community managed mental health services sector.

The presentation discussed recent adaptations to the Victorian Cultural Portfolio Holder program, including a variety of new initiatives to support cultural portfolio holders to build their own capacity, and that of their colleagues, in the area of culturally responsive practice.

The TheMHS Conference is an annual even hosted by the TheMHS Learning Network, an international learning network for improving mental health services in Australia and New Zealand. 

Doing Diversity Work: Victorian Cultural Portfolio Holders at TheMHS

The Mental Health Services Conference, or TheMHS as it is better known, is an international event held in various parts of Australia or New Zealand, drawing participants from broad geographic origins. Consumers, carers, their consultant representatives, and a diversity of service providers come together to share innovation and progress in the field of mental health.

ABOVE: Harvey Tuck, Shehani De Silva, Sue Drummond, Kimberley Wriedt, VTMH.

The Mental Health Services Conference, or TheMHS as it is better known, is an international event held in various parts of Australia or New Zealand, drawing participants from broad geographic origins. Consumers, carers, their consultant representatives, and a diversity of service providers come together to share innovation and progress in the field of mental health.

Jan Kilicaslan, Brigid Ryan and Emma Bohmer, from St Vincent’s Mental Health Service, and Harvey Tuck, VTMH’s  partnership consultant to St Vincent’s, presented “Diversity responsiveness and the cultural portfolio holder role in improving multicultural consumer experiences of mental health services”. They discussed the work of CPHs within the service, how CPH representatives are embedded across various mental health teams, and the changes that the CPHs have introduced that are improving consumer experiences of the service.