Children Of Parents With Mental Illness (COPMI)
Workforce Development and Regional Service Provider Collaboration
(Extension of Partnering Families), Ruah Inreach, WA

Stronger Families Learning Exchange Bulletin No.5 Autumn 2004 p.36-37

First glimpse - project responses to a series of questions

The project setting

The Children of Parents with Mental Illness (COPMI) collaboration is based in Perth, Western Australia. Its history involves two parallel strands.

In January 2002 Ruah Inreach, a nongovernment community-based agency, began documenting a piloted model of coordinated support to a group of families in which one parent had a mental illness. This project, known as Partnering Families, was located in the Armadale-Gosnells area of Perth, and also involved action research into the systems issues impacting on quality service to families.

Meanwhile, the Office of Mental Health in Western Australia had auspiced an interagency working group with health, welfare, education and community representation which produced 'Pathways to Resilience - Children of Parents with a Mental Illness Project Report' in October 2002. This report made a number of recommendations regarding the provision of coordinated services to children of parents with mental illness.

The structure of the current COPMI collaboration still shows evidence of those two strands. A Statewide Strategic Committee of departmental and consumer representatives is developing strategies for implementing systemic changes that will benefit COPMI families. Ruah Inreach has the task of developing competency based workforce development modules over a range of themes relevant to COPMI work, implementing pathways and protocols recommended by the Committee, and facilitating an action research framework.

Why is the project needed?

Many adult consumers of mental health services are parents, a fact that can often be overlooked by the services or concealed from them. These consumers' children usually receive services only when there are recognised problems. Services have often worked in 'silos' where each family member may be treated or helped by a different agency, but their role within the family and how the dynamics within the family are affected by one adult's mental illness is a blind spot for each of these services. Where two services, such as a child-focused one and an adult-centred one, are working with different members of the same family, possibilities for cooperative work are frequently forestalled when issues of confidentiality, organisational capacity or workers' confidence or skill to work outside their specialty area arise.

What are you trying to do in this project?

This project attempts to raise awareness among agencies about the needs of COPMI families, and to identify ways that services can be more responsive to those needs. The roles for Ruah Inreach in this process are to: support regional service provider groups; design, deliver and evaluate training to a range of service providers, attempting to convey a family-centred, family-sensitive approach; and assist in conducting action research.

How are you going about it?

The Statewide Strategic Committee is supported by a state-funded project worker, and Ruah Inreach has committed two workers to the project. They are working together as an Action Research team, providing a secretariat to the Committee, providing opportunities for broader participation in the process, and documenting the key themes as they emerge, to be addressed in the training modules and interagency protocols.

Activities include:

The Statewide Strategic Committee will consult widely to develop templates, then Ruah Inreach will work with service providers in specific pilot areas to implement, resolve issues with, and evaluate these templates.

Action research is an integral part of the process of consulting and developing solutions. At three-monthly intervals the Statewide Strategic Committee and its sub-committees will be asked to reflect on their processes, and this reflection fed back to the Committee to inform its processes for the next phase. Similarly, the piloting, evaluating and modification of workforce development models uses an action research approach.