Introduction to Open Dialogue work – Toward Humanising Healthcare

Description

About the Psychotherapy Special Interest Group:
The Australian College of Mental Health Nurses Psychotherapy SIG are pleased to bring members, guests, students and all those interested to extend learn and grow their psychotherapy skills. This year the Psychotherapy SIG will offer a series of webinars to begin the process of extension and enrichment of practice for those nurses who are interested in psychotherapy. The topics this year will include practical useable skills, and there will be opportunities for case presentations and peer supervision with members if needed. Even if you have never thought of yourself as a “psychotherapist”, remember that it has always been part of our core competence as mental health nurses.

About the Online Event:
The Psychotherapy SIG of the Australian College of Mental Health Nurses will be holding its second online event for members and guests on Wednesday 14 April. The event is a great opportunity for members and guests to hear a presentation from Phillip Benjamin on Open Dialogue.
Join us for the second session of the year for this interesting presentation, and network online with members and colleagues.

Guest Presenter: Phillip Benjamin
Phil was trained as an RPN at Larundel Hospital in the mid-seventies, and soon moved to community work in Broken Hill, later training as a secondary teacher and travelling overseas, but returned to his roots in mental health in the mid-nineties. Since then he has mainly worked in Crisis Teams and ED in Victoria, NSW and for the past ten years in Queensland. He completed a cross-disciplinary Masters at Monash, including a research project exploring clinical responses to trauma disclosures.
Between 2010 and the start of the Covid pandemic he was a frequent traveller to the UK, Europe and the USA, attending training seminars and conferences on Open Dialogue, the Hearing Voices approach, Compassion Focussed Therapy and the Trieste model of mental health care and various site visits, including two visits to Tornio, in Western Lapland, where Open Dialogue was developed, attended Open Dialogue training seminars in Belgium, Czechia and New York and Open Dialogue conferences in Europe and the USA, and has worked extensively with experts-by-experience in the peer worker community and participated in Recovery Camps in the UK. In 2010 he launched the Australian branch of ISPS (isps.org.au) and in 2012 coordinated a visit and series of seminars around Australia by the two of the Finnish originators of Open Dialogue. In 2104 coordinated the first ISPS Australia conference in Melbourne. He was a Trustee of Intervoice (intervoiceonline.org) for many years and continues to support Australian and international Hearing Voices groups on Facebook. He has been mainly working in Emergency Psychiatry in Brisbane for the last ten years with periods teaching undergraduate and postgraduate nursing students.