At Monash Health, we embrace innovation and collaboration to achieve real gender equity across all service areas. Our compliance with the Gender Equality Act 2020 extends to conducting assessments of our services, programs and policies which impact the public.
Ania Krysztofiak, Monash Health’s Mental Health Program Sexual Safety Clinical Coordinator, is a leading advocate for promoting respectful relationships across Monash Health. This includes ensuring that the sexual safety of patients and employees is a key priority across our acute mental health inpatient units.
Modelling positive relationships
The ‘Welcome Project’ launches on 1 August 2022 in Unit 2 of Dandenong Hospital. This pilot project highlights the importance of building mutually respectful relationships early to encourage positive relationships across the ward.
“We understand the importance of training employees to build awareness, be comfortable to have the key conversations early, and model those behaviours ourselves,” Ania says.
The project is supported by a welcome pack for patients outlining mutual expectations and healthy boundaries while in our care and an employee checklist to help our team start the conversation about living together and the importance of valuing others as individuals, regardless of gender, sexuality, race, culture or religious background.
Promoting sexual safety and understanding the diversity of needs, risks, and challenges of patients and employees across Monash Health facilities is essential in encouraging positive relationships.
Further, modelling positive relationships helps to build mutual respect between our employees and patients and can help guide early conversations about the expectations of patients while they are in our care. It also promotes the importance of personal self-care, resilience and self-determination.
Monash Health employees can support these initiatives by increasing their awareness of the importance of sexual safety within the recovery journey of their patients and their families.
Everyone has the right to be and feel safe
Patients with mental illness are more likely to be vulnerable to sexual safety breaches. The Mental Health Act 2014 sets out that there is a need to protect the safety and wellbeing of people using mental health services. It is important that we continue to create a safe environment for patients and employees, free from sexual activity, sexual harassment and alleged sexual assault.
The Right to Be Safe Report (RTBS) outlines that sexual safety requires a cohesive approach to implementation and a framework that is grounded in principles of human rights, gender equality and violence prevention.
“It is important to strengthen the awareness and understanding of sexual safety across the mental health program,” Ania says.
She has also devised a separate RTBS Action Plan, with a focus on patient orientation, staff training and support, and procedures to improve safety for all patients and employees. Funding has been granted and the roll-out of training for mental health services on providing gender-sensitive care is in progress.
“It would be shortsighted to believe that this is all that is needed to improve safety, but it is a vital component to improve the actual and perceived safety of our patients,” she says.
Better outcomes for all
The main goal is to maximise the sexual safety of mental health consumers accessing Monash Health inpatient services, particularly in response to the recommendations from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System report in 2021.
Ongoing work includes aligning our response to the MARAM (Multi Agency Risk Assessment and Management) Family Violence screening for standard mental health assessment to meet our responsibility to identify and respond to family violence risk.
By raising awareness and improving our approach to training and sexual safety, we can introduce improvements across the wider Monash Health network to provide better patient and employee outcomes and provide safer ward environments.
For more information on the Welcome Project or sexual safety at Monash Health, please email Ania Krysztofiak at Ania.Krysztofiak@MonashHealth.org
Approved by: Paula Hakesley