Family Clinician North East Metro Mental Health

Perm Part time 0.6 EFT Family Clinician, Ashburton (East region)
- Not for Profit, salary packaging benefits, flexibility & wellbeing support
- Collaborative, highly skilled team career development opportunities

**About the **North East Metro Mental Health and Wellbeing Connect**

Access Health and Community leads the North East Metro Mental Health and Wellbeing Connect in partnership with Self Help Addiction Resource Centre (SHARC), healthAbility and Inspiro, to deliver mental health and wellbeing services for families and carers in North East Metro region of Victoria. We aspire to provide a service of hope, recovery and humanity to improve the mental health and wellbeing of families and carers within our community. Our service is codesigned, governed and led by people with lived/living experience as families or carers of people with mental health and/or substance use challenges.

**The opportunity**

The Family Clinician will provide support, family counselling for families, carers and supporters of people with mental health and/or substance use challenges. This role aims to provide effective, accessible and quality care to families and carers of people with mental health and/or substance use challenges. This may include undertaking assessments, developing goals with families, carers and other professionals. The Family Clinician will work as a part of the team and deliver educational and support groups to families and carers, providing single session family consultation where appropriate and referral to additional specialist supports and advocacy where required. Services may be delivered in person or via telehealth.

This position will sit across the North East Metro Mental Health and Wellbeing Connect hub and/or satellite sites to maximise families’ easy access to services. This position may be required to provide services out of hours or on Saturdays. Supported by the Mental Health and Wellbeing Connect Team Leader and Program Manager, the Family Clinician will work to inspire hope and confidence in families, carers and supporters to achieve improved health and wellbeing with a focus on their strengths and resilience as part of their caring journey.

**What you will be doing**
- Deliver family counselling to family and carers of people affected by mental health or substance use concerns utilising evidence-based family therapy approaches. Services can be provided inclusive of the person being cared for, or to individual members of the family (without the person being cared for present)
- Conduct assessments and develop individual and/or family treatment plans
- Provide brief and medium-term interventions to support families in their role as carers, including provision of single-session family consultation, where indicated
- Work from a systemic approach and utilise contemporary family therapy approaches, i.e., solution-focussed and narrative approaches, behavioural family therapy etc
- Provide support and psychoeducation to families and carers to increase an understanding of the symptoms of the mental illness and substance use and their impact on families
- Alongside Family and Carer Peer Workers, assist family members in developing an understanding of the concept of recovery and change process, while fostering a sense of hope
- Assess risk and develop collaborative and trauma-informed risk management plans for family members and carers utilising AccessHC Local Protocols
- Facilitate family members’ skills building in areas such as self-care, personal resilience, positive communication, problem-solving and negotiating healthy boundaries while promoting a notion of connection, compassion and capacity to repair relationship raptures if occur
- Participate in the development and delivery of therapeutic/support group programs
- Utilise client engagement strategies that are flexible and include a collaborative approach with other family members and other services.
- Participate in shared care with internal and external services, including attendance at care team meetings, case coordination and clinical reviews where appropriate
- Work within the scope of practice defined for the role and as agreed with line manager
- Provide services in both face-to-face and telehealth modalities, including at satellite locations

**What you will bring**
- Tertiary qualifications in social work, psychology, counselling, alcohol and other drugs or related disciplines
- Relevant qualifications and /or experience in family counselling or family therapy with minimum 2 years' experience Lived/Living experience as a family or carer is highly desirable (although this is not a designated lived/living experience role)
- Demonstrated understanding of trauma informed practice, recovery-oriented and strengths-based approaches and family-inclusive practice
- Demonstrated understanding of the key issues affecting families, carers and supporters of people with mental health and/or substance use challenges, and how these may intersect w