A safe and supportive working environment is at the centre of effective practice, capability development, and sustainable, lifelong careers for our workforce.
Cultures of curiosity, collaboration and care
It takes great dedication, compassion and strength to work in the mental health and wellbeing sector.
As a workforce, you told us how important it is for you to feel empowered, trusted and respected in your daily work. You told us you want to feel safe and supported in your roles, with enough time for reflective practice and professional practice supervision. You told us you want to have the right balance of time with consumers alongside other responsibilities.
In addition, the Royal Commission emphasised that an effective workforce needs a mental health and wellbeing system that:
- encourages and supports excellence, and values all types of expertise – including lived experience expertise
- enables the workforce to use existing capabilities, and develop skills and knowledge to continually improve the quality of treatment, care and support
- ensures the workforce feels safe, trusted, respected and valued
- ensures the Victorian mental health and wellbeing system is an attractive, contemporary and sustainable place to work that supports workforce wellbeing and career progression.
We also know that to create safe and supportive working environments, our workforce needs good physical working environments, with robust occupational health and safety, effective supervision and allocation of resources.
Some workforce groups face additional challenges. These include those working in rural and isolated services, lived experience workforces and workforces with diverse identities such as Aboriginal practitioners, LGBTIQ+ practitioners and culturally diverse practitioners. We know we will need tailored approaches to create safe and supportive working environments for these workforce cohorts.
This capability framework helps service providers, organisations, workforce professional bodies, educators and others to support the wellbeing and safety of the mental health workforce. It seeks to build cultures of curiosity, collaboration and care through evidence-informed practice.
If we wish to provide a recovery-oriented, compassionate experience for consumers, carers, families and supporters, we need to do the same thing for our workforce. We need to create working environments that make our workforce feel safe, respected and valued for the expertise you bring to your work. This will allow our workforce to build knowledge, skills and collaborative ways of working with each other as well as consumers, families, carers and supporters.
Reviewed 04 December 2023