Banyule Council MCH Acting Team Leader Sam Nicholson
Maternal and child health nurses are benefiting from training in trauma-informed practice, ANMF member and Banyule Council MCH Acting Team Leader, Sam Nicholson said.
My early relational trauma-informed learning (MERTIL) training has been rolled out to Victoria’s MCH nurses by Deakin University in partnership with the Royal Women’s Hospital and the Department of Education and Training.
The online and face-to-face training is led by two of Australia’s foremost infant trauma experts: Jennifer McIntosh, Professor of Attachment Studies at Deakin’s Centre for Social and Early Emotional Development, in collaboration with Louise Newman, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne and Director of the Royal Women’s Hospital’s Centre for Women’s Mental Health.
Ms Nicholson said knowledge of impacts of trauma on children and their parents was essential for maternal and child health nurses who are working with increasingly complex clients.
‘The basis of the training was for all (MCH) team members to be able to identify and respond to signs of trauma in children and their parents,’ she said.
‘The feedback from Banyule team members was that it was excellent training to support the often challenging work that we do with families, assisting us to improve outcomes for children’.
The Andrews Government provided $765,000 for the development and rollout of the MERTIL training as a response to recommendations from the 2016 Royal Commission into Family Violence.
Additional family violence training for maternal and child health nurses will be rolled out in 2019 with the release of the new Multi-Agency Risk Assessment (MARAM) Framework.
