Get involved; how you can help

Participation Program

Alfred Mental and Addiction Health is committed to working in partnership with our consumers and carers to continuously improve the quality of care that we provide. Whether it's planning new services or working to improve the quality of our current services, we work within a co-design framework that includes the voices of consumers, carers, families and clinicians working collaboratively to provide the best possible care.

Consumer and Carer Participation provides opportunities for people to share their individual stories and to have their experiences heard and acknowledged which is integral to a respectful and compassionate mental health and wellbeing system. Alongside individual benefits, the sharing of individual stories and experiences plays an important role in creating a system that responds to people’s changing needs and expectations.

Consumer and carer participants have an opportunity to engage in a range of activities related to our mental health service. These include:  

• Service improvement and strategic planning
• Staff recruitment and orientation
• Committee and board representation
• Service evaluation – research and surveys
• Education and lived experience story telling
• Participation in our discovery college- contributing to co-design workshops for the creation of new course content or as a recovery educator-expert by experience

The Consumer and Carer Participation Program will:

• Engage consumer and carer participants as respected equals
• Ensure participants receive relevant and necessary ongoing support, education, training and resourcing
• Support participants through supervision and debriefing without judgement
• Remunerate participants for their engagement in activities

Register your interest in our participation program here

Advisory Groups

In the Infant, Child and Youth Area Mental Health & Wellbeing Service, carer participants can engage in the Family and Friends Advisory Group.

The Family and Friends Advisory Group is a working group of family and friends of children and young people who use or have used our service or the headspace Bentleigh service. The group provides direct input about how the service is operating and discusses possible ways of improving service delivery.

The service welcomes the family and friend's perspective and their personal experience of the service. This information is vital for the continuous improvement of the service. The Family and Friends Advisory Group meets six times a year. For further information, please contact the Family Peer Specialist Manager on (03) 8552 0555.

Feedback and Complaints

The Alfred Mental and Addiction Health service is created for you. Your compliments, complaints, comments and feedback all help us to provide a service that you are happy to engage with. Your voice helps us in our own journey to build a respectful, collaborative and future driven service. Making a complaint will not have any negative impact on your care or relationship with your team.

Feedback can be provided directly to your treating team or you can ask to speak to the manager of your area.  

Alternatively, you can contact the Patient Liaison Officer at the Alfred on (03) 9076 8001 or email feedback@alfred.org.au

You can also visit the Alfred Health feedback page on this website.

 If you feel that your complaint has not be resolved you can also contact the Mental Health Complaints Commissioner on 1800 246054.