Video transcript

People who have difficultly with their mental health are a disadvantaged group and people who work with disadvantaged groups in society you have to come up against all the stigma and lack of services, the disadvantages, homelessness and poverty. Those are things we try and address when we are working with people but are incredibly difficult problems. So that's a challenge.

I think working in a rural area can be a challenge sometimes in terms of resources and access to professional development but there are ways of overcoming that so I think rural services can be quite creative in overcoming challenges and using their partnerships with providers and using technology and using other ways of actually accessing those things.

I've seen a lot of positive change. I think we often get overwhelmed by all that we have to do and all the change that still we want to achieve but even preparing for this interview its made me realise how many positives I’ve seen and the changes in the way we deliver services, the amount of involvement now that consumers and carers have in all sorts of different levels of service delivery.

One of the reason I continue to work in the public mental health system for all its challenges and frustrations at times is that if I were to consider the alternative which is to work in relative isolation as a psychiatrist, I don’t believe that I would be able to do as good a job on my own because I firmly believe that working alone side my colleagues from other disciplines we can offer a far better service together and working as a team than we can in isolation working in our individual silos of practice if you like.

I actually like the challenge and I don’t see it as a flip side or a down side, I think that if it was easy, why would you do it? The challenge is that you always want to see something get better and so you strive to achieve an outcome of any sort whatever that is.