Mental Health and Wellbeing Connect centre workforce project

A FaCRAN-Led Project

This 12-month project explored the experiences of the carer workforce in the new Victorian Mental Health and Wellbeing Connect Centres, peer-led service model. Using participatory approaches, the project engaged Connect Centre workers in both designated family carer roles and roles where workers have a declared lived experience that they draw on in carrying out their work. The project produced a final report for the Victorian Department of Health and family carer workforce which includes 46 policy and practice recommendations to better support and grow the carer workforce in community and clinical settings.

FaCRAN would like to acknowledge that this project was funded by the Victorian Department of Health’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Division and supported by RMIT’s Enabling Impact Platform and the Victorian Collaborative Centre.

About the project

In response to Recommendation 31 of the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System (2021), eight Mental Health and Wellbeing Connect Centres were established across Victoria to provide peer support to family members, carers, and supporters of people experiencing mental health issues. Researchers from RMIT University’s FaCRAN (Family and Carer Research Advocacy Network) funded by the Victoria Department of Health to explore the experiences of the carer workforce in the new Victorian Mental Health and Wellbeing Connect Centres. This project describes, maps and defines the new centres’ carer workforce in the context of the peer-led service model.

Read the report here

About the research team

The research team included people who have lived and living experience of supporting family members with mental health issues. The researchers are RMIT University staff and members of FaCRAN, which is the Family and Carer Research Advocacy Network, which is hosted by RMIT University.

FaCRAN is a Victorian based, nation-wide, collective of family carers, carer researchers and research allies, who engage in carer-led and carer focused research. Situated at RMIT, members of the FaCRAN research team champions family carer lived and living experience ensuring that each element of the research process is thoughtfully led by carer researchers and includes family carers using participatory methodologies. By ‘researching alongside’ and not ‘researching on’, the team pay close attention to known power imbalances, inclusion of intersectional and diverse perspectives, accessibility and psychological safety as well as developing measures and outcomes that have meaning for the lived experience staff and the family, carers, kin and supporters they service.

As family carer researchers we hope participating in this research project is a positive, reaffirming, and empowering experience.

Meet the researchers

Dr Caroline Lambert

Project Lead Dr Caroline Lambert is a carer perspective researcher and lecturer at RMIT. She is a co-convenor and co-founder of FaCRAN. Caroline is a neurodivergent carer who draws on her own lived and living experiences to engage in participatory, family carer focused research and to produce work which is rooted in acts of advocacy and resistance.

Associate Professor Sharlene Nipperess

Sharlene Nipperess is an associate professor in social work at RMIT University, Melbourne. She is a qualified and experienced social worker and has worked as a social work educator and researcher for over twenty years. Her teaching and research focuses on critical approaches to practices that protect and promote human rights and work towards social and environmental justice. Sharlene has published on social work ethics, critical multicultural and human rights-based practice, environmental justice and the role and impact of technology in social work. She engages in collaborative and participatory research primarily in the areas of migration and displacement, mental distress, disability and family and carer lived experiences, and housing precarity and homelessness.

Associate Professor Christina David

Christina David is a social work academic in the RMIT Social Work and Human Services discipline and a FaCRAN founding member. Christina engages in qualitative research and participatory methodologies which focus on working collaboratively with communities to advance practice and policy reform and social change, in the key areas of disability, mental health, and family care and support.

Professor Robyn Martin

Robyn is a social worker of 34 years and is the Associate Dean for Social Work and Human Services at RMIT University. Her research and practice focus on enabling the voices and perspectives of people with lived and living experience of marginalisation and discrimination to be recognised and respected. Her social work practice, teaching and research focus on trauma, mental health, homelessness and violence. She is an active researcher who is committed to inclusive and participatory approaches.

Deua Stojanovska

Deua is a Family Carer Academic and our lived experience project manager. She brings a background as an Anthropologist, Family Carer Researcher, and member of the CLEW Network. Deua recently co-led the development of the Victorian Mental Health Family Carer Lived Experience Workforce Discipline Framework. She has previously held positions at ANU and La Trobe University and is passionate about the lived experience workforce, research methods and issues of accessibility, relationality, and structural and epistemic marginality. In her work, Deua explores how organisational practices, government policies, and resourcing shape whole families’ experiences of wellbeing.

Lucy Bashfield

Lucy is a Research Officer. She has recently worked on a lived-experience led research project into Experiences of Police Apprehension for Mental Health Crises, and has coordinated the evaluation of an advocacy pilot service for parents involved in the child protection system, and the evaluation of the integrated chronic care pilot services alongside a consumer co-production led team. Previously, she supported womxn experiencing homelessness, Aboriginal families involved in the out of home care system, worked in a state-wide homelessness crisis centre, and was a project manager for various sexual assault, childhood education, and Aboriginal family support programs. Luch also brings international experience in research and community organising, article writing and reporting, and refugee welfare from across the American continents. She is a graduate of the Master of Social Work and Juris Doctor student at RMIT University, has taught into the Bachelor of Social Work and the Bachelor of Social Sciences (Psychology), and has a deep interest in structural change, and well as somatic and Kingian nonviolence practice.