An update from Northern Adelaide Mental Health Alliance
The Northern Adelaide Mental Health Alliance (NAMHA) is a collective of community members comprised of people with lived experience, NGOs, local governments, community service providers, key stakeholders and the Northern Adelaide Local Health Network.
The NAMHA aims to improve mental health outcomes for people in the Northern suburbs of Adelaide. The Alliance achieves this by regularly bringing stakeholders together with a shared vision and purpose to work collaboratively to understand the needs of the community, identify gaps and nurture innovative ideas that can enhance service delivery and collaboration.
Functions of the NAMHA include:
- Mapping all mental health services in the North and North-East Adelaide catchments
- Mobilising assets and resources to support key priorities for action
- Describing how a consumer may step through community mental health services
- Working to achieve improved service partnering and service integration
Sonder is proud to be a partner of the NAMHA, along with Northern Adelaide Local Health Network, Uniting Communities, City of Salisbury Council, Feros Care, UnitingCare Wesley Bowden, NEAMI, SA Housing Authority, Lived Experience Leadership & Advocacy Network (LELAN), Mind Australia, Adelaide PHN and Aspire Recovery Connection.
For more information about NAMHA and to become a member, visit namha.com.au
An update from the September NAMHA meeting
The September meeting of the Northern Alliance was held at Ingle Farm Recreation Centre, kindly hosted by the South Australian Intellectual Disability Health Service (SAIDHS).
We welcomed a number of new members to the Alliance at this meeting. Despite it being a rather wet and rainy start to the day, the Alliance was delighted to see over thirty people attend the meeting, representing sixteen organisations.
It was particularly pleasing to see more representation from community members. The Northern Alliance values the voice of lived experience in all aspects of service planning, design, and delivery. If your organisation employs people in designated lived experience positions, or members of community advisory groups who would like to participate in the Alliance, please feel free to get in touch.
Chair, Anne Burgess, welcomed everyone to the meeting. During the introduction, Anne encouraged Alliance members to take up the opportunity to host a stall at the Northern Adelaide Local Health Network (NALHN) Annual General Meeting (AGM). This event will be held on Saturday 19th of November in the afternoon at Central Districts Football Club rooms. The NALHN AGM will be an engaging event for the community and will focus on mental health and wellbeing. Alliance members are strongly encouraged to consider taking the opportunity to connect and share details of their organisations, programs, and initiatives. Those wishing to hold a stall are invited to connect further (details below).
Commencing the formal presentations for the day, Christopher Nelson from SAIDHS spoke about the work of their service supporting individuals in the community with an intellectual disability. Christopher is keen to connect with mental health organisations in the North so please reach out if you would like to connect further, either directly to Chris, or via details below. The resources Christopher mentioned in his presentation are attached for those who would like further reading on this important topic.
Chris Chalubek from Sonder, accompanied by community co-design partner, Kristal, spoke next about the development of the Safe Haven Café in Salisbury. Chris is keen to connect with partnering members who would like to play a role in the Safe Haven (either through the development of warm referral pathways between services or via co-location opportunities). The Safe Haven will be open for operation soon (early November) and we will keep the Alliance members posted with details of the launch!
Continuing the theme of presentations with the uniting thread of lived experience, Dani from Aspire Recovery Connection (ARC), accompanied by Board Members, Jenny and Constance, shared their experiences of ARC’s 100% lived experience service. Dani spoke of the challenges and benefits of working in the NDIS space. We were grateful to share the personal experiences of the group.
Rounding off the day, VIS Global (Melbourne-based design team developing the Northern Alliance Service Directory App) showed the wireframe design. The Northern Alliance Service Directory App will be different from most generic, third-party-hosted apps, with more individualised and localised content. The app is now available for download through the App Store (for commentary and design input). The app will be content managed by Alliance members and participating members will be contacted soon to identify their internal content administrator (to manage the content upload).
The Alliance is celebrating its second anniversary and still going strong, and we hope to have a great celebration at our next meeting. Stay tuned for more details of this celebration!
Should you wish to put forward any agenda items for future meetings please get in touch via the details below.
As always, the Alliance welcomes new members at all times. Please share details of this communique through your networks and encourage other stakeholders to attend. Our strength is in our broad representation.
The Northern Adelaide Mental Health Alliance- Talk- Share- Act- Grow!
Please contact the Alliance Secretariat, Kelly Stewart via email at Health.NALHNMentalHealthProjects@sa.gov.au or kelly.stewart@sa.gov.au or via mobile 0432 895 602.