Posted 16 Mar 2010 - 13:06 by root
The March network meeting was held in Mark St Hall, 1 Mark St, North Fitzroy. This venue will be used for a number of meetings throughout 2010. It is located in a peaceful street with unlimited street parking in immediate proximity.
VAADA's Executive Officer Sam Biondo welcomed the participants and facilitated the meeting. Sam indicated further to Gail's Departure that VAADA is looking for a new project coordinator and in the meantime he will be covering the position. He or Edita can be contacted for any necessity.
From the roundtable update it emerged that most projects are dealing with a few similar issues at the moment - DDCAT review, establishment of consumer reference group and QICSA are the reoccurring topics.
Rose Coulter and Regina Brindle from SHARC and Maya Raschel from WRAD gave presentations on their organisations.
Rose told us about the variety of SHARC's activities, some of which are:
- support for families and carers through AOD helpline, 24 AOD support groups and collaboration with Family Drug Help;
- prisoners support program;
- partnership with ReachOut, in particular The Blossom Project for women aged 16-22;
- recreation program.
Rose is attempting to include a program for Dual Diagnosis workers in the recreation program. She has already organised Mindfulness training for staff, which was requested by staff and well received, however the attendance at trainings is always an issue. Regina told us about her work with the APSU (Association of Participating Service Users) branch of SHARC. Particularly interesting aspect of her work is carers participation.
Maya's presentation was focused on WRAD's database. WRAD's incredibly skilled IT consultant implemented a system of transferring data from ADIS into an Access database. The Access database then enables extraction of data by any type of information available, i.e. you can quickly extract information about housing situation of all the clients in the given period and get all the summary of the details that exist in ADIS.
Amira Rahmanovic, Training Manager from Multicultural Centre for Women's Health (MCWH) gave a very interesting and engaging presentation about her organisation's activity. MCWH's main activity is health promotion and education for refugee and immigrant women which they do in 20 languages. The peculiarity of the MCWH's operation is that they work almost entirely in outreach. Given that health issues for immigrant and refugee women are far from being a priority in the first few years of their living in Australia (when they are most vulnerable), they tend not to seek information on health topics. MCWH solved this problem by going out in the communities and working places and delivering the information in a culturally appropriate manner. MCWH is open for collaboration with all the organisations that already do or would work with CALD communities by designing a project and applying for funding in partnership. They have been collaborating for an extensive period of time with some AOD agencies such as Turning Point and Reconnexion. Amira left some information pamphlets about services offered by MCWH; you may contact Edita if you would be interested in receiving them by mail or have a look at their website. Provision of information sessions to communities of immigrant and refugee women is a state-wide service available 24/7 free of charge. Training in cross-cultural communication for staff is available for a fee. Multicultural Centre for Women's Health is located in Carringbush Building, 134 Cambridge Street, Collingwood, tel. 9418 0999.
The present network members discussed the necessity of continuing the established working groups activity and or the establishment of new ones. It was concluded that at present there is no immediate need in continuing the Policies & Procedures group; the documents developed by that group will be loaded on VAADA Comorbidity website for use of all network members. The link for access to these documents will be communicated via group e-mail.
The Training and Education Working Group is near the end of its project and needs another meeting to conclude it.
Participants have expressed interest to form a group of Community Health Services where they could discuss the particular aspects of the project in CHS setting, share activities and collaborate to find the best approach to issues such as Track. A group e-mail will be sent to collect interest in this group.
Simon Kroes facilitated discussion on evaluation of the project. The main concern was evaluation of those aspects of the projects that are not measurable with DDCAT, such as impact on relationships within the organisation, cultural change, impact on local communities and similar. It was decided that evaluation will be the main topic of the May meeting. A group was established that will, in collaboration with VAADA, prepare the content, including an expert speaker, for the meeting.
Karen Graham told us about her preparations for the April meeting in Cowes Cultural Centre, Meeting Room 1, Thompson Avenue, Cowes, Phillip Island. She has already booked a venue and a number of very interesting speakers. Draft agenda should be ready before the end of March. Karen distributed to all those present the map of the area and some information pamphlets, including accommodation.