Dr Melissa Petrakis from the Department of Social Work presented last month at the annual Mental Health Services conference (TheMHS) for Australia and New Zealand. She was invited to share a presentation: 'Enhancing responsiveness to family violence in front line mental health'. For the last 18 months Melissa has led a project in the field with the aims to determine and implement the best evidence-based practice tool for family violence identification and response in public mental health service contexts. Social work colleague Dr Deborah Western has acted as a research mentor to the project due to expertise in family violence identification and response.
The method has been to create a staff training/briefing package and identification and response resource – a “prompt card”, wearable on the staff lanyard, alongside the ID card, for ready reference. Melissa and colleague Meg Buck from St Vincent's Mental Health Service, reported on trialling this training/briefing package and identification and response resource in a clinical service setting. The audience was very excited regarding transferability and utility to various urban and regional contexts.