Fuse Initiatives has grown during 2021-2022. The program undertook it’s funded activities for the year, and alongside the mental health, carer, and AOD recovery peer workforces had the opportunity to develop a new set of lived and living experience workforce initiatives, funded by the Victorian government. These initiatives have started in the current year.
There is a growing opportunity and need to provide appropriate support and mentoring to a workforce that work in mainstream health services & offers their perspective from a place of living experience.
This group of workers are from the community and so are also faced with issues such as stigma and discrimination, overdose risk, blood borne virus risk and so on. However, Harm Reduction Peer Workers (HRPWs) are also uniquely qualified and capable of engaging and working with service users for this reason too. We speak the same language. Put simply we help make services more trusted and credible.
Over the course of 2021-22 we partnered with the Association of Participating Service Users (APSU) and developed a foundational document that outlined our goals for the workforce and led us in to developing more of the strategic documents necessary to support and build a peer workforce, hopefully make workplaces safer for peer workers and attract more people with living experience into working in this field. As a heavily criminalised group we know that drug law reform is also crucial for workplace safety.
We developed the Harm Reduction Peer Workforce Strategy, which is about to be launched. This document outlines our aims for the next few years and maps the activities and further documents that need to be developed.
We have also started developing these necessary documents, including:
Harm Reduction Peer Workforce Support & Supervision Framework
An Organisational Readiness Training package.
A scope of practice document and more.
Strategic documents aside, what has always been important to us, is the wellbeing of our peer workforce.
We try to support that wellbeing with our Fuse Network - a monthly support and upskilling meeting that allows Victorian HRPWs to come together in a space that is safe, where you can be yourself and where we can talk about issues that may be affecting us in the workplace. It is also an opportunity to reflect on practice, receive training from a living experience peer perspective and share information about drug trends in each location.
We also provide 1-on-1 support interventions for HRPW’s. These allow for the unpacking of issues that they may not want to speak about at work in the first instance. Amelia and Nadia had the opportunity to do Bouverie’s External Supervision Training and soon we will be able to provide discipline-specific external supervision. This is huge as there has not been this opportunity before.
Many of these opportunities and changes have come about because the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System required change to be led by affected community. As a result, there is now a Lived Experience Branch at the Department of Health and Fuse Initiatives has been funded, as outlined earlier, to lead on the work concerning harm reduction peer workforce.
We have been lucky enough to grow the team and while we will talk more about their work in the next Annual Report, I’d like to welcome Christian and Matt to the team!