Our recent STAR Award winner for Improving Care and Access is the Monash Health Community Child and Family Psychology team.
This award is for an individual, group or team that develop improved ways for patients to access and manage their care. This may include developing partnerships with our community to enhance patient independence and wellbeing, supporting prevention and early intervention, developing new ways to help patients or colleagues feel safe, included, and experience improved equity of care.
Joel Pinches, Clinical Psychology Registrar, and Dr Jessica Christiansz, Senior Psychologist, and Chris Kirmos, Clinical Psychologist, have developed and trialed a new intervention program to improve access for parents on the Child and Family’s psychology waitlist.
The highly innovative telehealth group program offers emotional regulation knowledge and skills to parents. The treatment combines psychoeducation, cognitive behaviour therapy, attachment-based therapies, and a circle of security foundation skills. The single online session is offered monthly to small groups, and improved access for 39 parents since Oct 2022.
Currently, the psychology team are working to condense the therapeutic content to allow for more Q&A during the session. They also hope to partner with Interpreter Services to record Webinars of the session in other languages.
The Child and Family Psychology team have gone over and above to make this happen. Well done Chris, Joel, and Jess, for this inspirational work to improve access to treatment for parents and their kids!
If you would like to nominate a colleague or team, you can do so at any time by visiting the STAR Awards portal. For more information about the STAR Awards program, Monash Health Employee Recognition Program page.
Approved by Chris McLoughlin, Executive Director People and Culture