Recommendation 57

Workforce strategy, planning and structural reform

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Status: Delivered

What the Royal Commission said

The range of mental health and wellbeing services is expanding in Victoria as services shift to more community-based care, with the goal of providing Victorians care closer to their homes. These services need a diverse, skilled and multidisciplinary workforce.

The Royal Commission recommended a range of structural workforce reforms. It also recommended reforms to develop new and enhanced workforce roles.

These reforms aim to attract, train and transition the staff needed for Victoria's mental health and wellbeing services. These include non-government organisations, community services, and Local, Area and Statewide Mental Health and Wellbeing Services.

The Royal Commission highlighted many systemic issues that affect workers and have contributed to workforce shortages.

Some of the challenges include:

  • staff burn out
  • the need to develop more pathways into employment
  • poor avenues for career progression
  • workforce stigma
  • a lack of specialist skill development
  • difficulty retaining employees in the workforce.

What we've achieved

Growing the workforce

  • Workforce programs, including the commissioning of early career and graduate programs, have supported a 33 per cent growth in the Victorian public mental health workforce between 2021 and 2025. This equates to over 2,800 FTE.
  • Over 2,500 early career roles have been commissioned in nursing and allied health since 2021.
  • A nation leading investment in the Lived and Living experience workforce, which has also grown by 125 per cent since 2021.
  • We have also delivered a total of 90 new, work ready mental health support workers into the sector through the Earn and Learn Program. Supporting students to work while they completed their studies.

What we're doing

Mental Health and Wellbeing Workforce Strategy

  • Victoria's Mental Health and Wellbeing Workforce Strategy 2021-2024 (the Strategy) was published in December 2021. The 2022-23 Victorian State Budget invested a record $372 million to support the vision and priorities for workforce reform outlined in the Strategy.
  • The investment supports more than 100 psychiatry registrars, more than 400 mental health nurses, more than 300 psychologists and over 600 extra allied health clinicians in the mental health and wellbeing sector.
  • The Strategy will be reviewed in collaboration with our sector partners to ensure it continues to meet the needs of services, the workforce and community.
  • Strategy initiatives include:

More early career positions for nurses, allied health and psychiatry trainees

  • In 2022 the Mental Health Early Career program was launched to expand and diversify the mental health workforce.
  • The program focused initially on mental health nurses, occupational therapists, social workers and psychologists. In 2023 it was expanded to include art and music therapists, speech pathologists, exercise physiologists, dietitians, clinical pharmacists and physiotherapists.
  • The Early Career program continues to support practitioners to enter the mental health workforce within a structured and supported environment to ensure a highly trained and well-equipped workforce.

Prequalification employment program

  • The Department of Health funded Prequalification Program was designed to provide additional on-the-job experience for undergraduate students of allied health, nursing and medicine to encourage earlier consideration of a career in public mental health.
  • Modelled on the Registered Undergraduate Student of Nursing (RUSON) program, the Prequalification Program commenced with 120 positions, each providing up to 30 hours of paid, on-the-job work experience.
  • Students were employed as supernumerary mental health support workers in Area Mental Health and Wellbeing Services. The program offered early exposure to the sector in a supported environment. It also provided an important recruitment pipeline for health services.
  • In 2023 the program was expanded from 120 to 285 positions across all 21 Mental Health and Wellbeing Services.

Earn and Learn Traineeship

  • The Department of Health funded six mental health community support services in 2023 and 2024 to deliver the Mental Health and Wellbeing Earn and Learn Traineeship program.
  • Designed to deliver work-ready mental health support workers, this program provided trainees with 12 months full-time employment at a community mental health service in a supernumerary capacity.
  • Students were provided with mentoring and supervision while being rotated through different areas of the service. In addition, students were provided with protected study time to enable them to achieve Cert IV or Diploma of Mental Health (or equivalent) by the end of the program.
  • These positions were designed to attract workers that would traditionally have been excluded from the workforce due to competing priorities such as family or carer responsibilities.
  • The program also provided career progression opportunities for more experienced clinicians to act in program development, educator and supervisory positions.

Allied Health and AOD Postgraduate Scholarship Program

  • The postgraduate scholarship program aims to build expertise in allied health, mental health and Alcohol and Other Drug (AOD) workforces.
  • This scholarship has been awarded annually since 2022 providing up to 50 allied health and 20 AOD postgraduate scholarships.

Student Placement Support Program

  • The Department of Health has funded five universities to increase access to, and the quality of, mental health student placements. Student placement coordinators have been employed to coordinate and facilitate increased numbers of mental health student placements in the mental health and AOD sector. Supported disciplines include medicine, psychology, nursing, occupational therapy, social work, art therapy, physiotherapy and speech pathology.
  • The Department of Health is continuing to see encouraging outcomes through ongoing collaboration and engagement with universities. The Department of Health remains committed to working closely with our partners for the remainder of the project and beyond, ensuring students are well-supported throughout their mental health student placements.

Pathways to Practice Incentive Grant Program

  • This program aims to increase student uptake of rural and regional mental health placements, and to strengthen interest in future employment in these areas, by addressing financial and structural barriers in two ways:
  1. By providing incentive grants to students to reduce the financial burden associated with travel and temporary relocation to rural and regional areas. Incentive Grants offer $575 per week, up to a maximum of $7,500, for eligible students completing mental health placements at eligible services on a full-time basis.
  2. By providing funding to health services to develop initiatives designed to deliver high quality student placement experiences. Funding of up to $30,000 per eligible Area Mental Health and Wellbeing Service is available.
  • Up to 520 incentive grants were available to eligible students in the 2026 calendar year. Applications will be assessed against eligibility criteria and funded on a first come, first served basis. Grants are limited and not guaranteed.

Updated

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