CMHL is pleased to report the Department of Health (DH) has expanded funding for the Pre-Qualification Employment program in 2023, allowing area mental health services to employ Nursing, Allied Health, and medical undergraduates to work part-time in mental health settings while completing their studies.
DH has again partnered with the Centre for Mental Health Nursing (CentreMHN) and Centre for Mental Health Learning (CMHL) to support the program's project coordinators and deliver reflective practice sessions.
Monthly meetings will be held and an online sharing space (via Basecamp) for all project coordinators will run for six months. These spaces facilitate:
- service updates
- sharing of recruitment challenges and opportunities
- provide the Basecamp platform, an online space, accessible to all services and used to facilitate the sharing of documents
- planning of reflective sessions
- opportunities for project coordinators to pose questions to other services and DH to collectively problem solve
- DH updates
- CentreMHN updates
- CMHL updates including reviewing plans for reflection practice sessions
CentreMHN and CMHL will again design and deliver discipline-specific reflective practice sessions, available to all pre-qualification program student participants.
Feedback from students from the previous reflective sessions was overwhelmingly positive:
- “It was great to hear what everyone is doing in their roles and different locations”
- “This was very engaging; it has also empowered my knowledge regarding mental health care”
- “I thought it was really valuable for my learning to speak to both members of the MDT as well as other pre-qual OTs”
- “Thank you for such an amazing couple of sessions, they have really helped foster my passion for mental health through being able to connect with experts and other like-minded people”
