Kaye has been featured as a contributor in the Spring 2018 edition of Primary Pulse, North Western Melbourne Primary Health Network’s (NWMPHN) quarterly magazine focusing on the key issues and partnerships shaping health in the North Western Melbourne PHN region.
Kaye commented in the magazine’s profile of Our local mental health system:
I’ve been a psychologist for 30 years and have spent more than half of my career working in the western suburbs of Melbourne. The first half of my professional life was in an environment where there were no Medicare item numbers for psychological treatment, so all the treatment that I provided as a private practitioner was paid for by the client. This made psychological treatment a very private matter and that in turn created more stigma around the profession than what we see these days.
When psychology was included in the Medicare scheme [2006], it revolutionised the profession. Nowadays, patients are much more likely to ask their general practitioner for a referral to a psychologist and more patients will tell their doctor they are suffering from a mental health condition.
I think general practitioners are pragmatists. They’re private practitioners themselves so they know that their role with mental health is to play the gatekeeper between patients and mental health professionals. They are very quick to try and find something that might help their patients and they understand that family health these days is a much more complicated exercise than it used to be.
The relationship between the GP and the mental health practitioner is about being able to talk freely. It is a partnership for me. You have to work with GPs who are seeing the patient more frequently than you are, who will care for them in the future in terms of their overall health and you just have to say “we are in this together. I will do what I can, but I need your help.”
In terms of the work NWMPHN are doing with mental health, I think the process of eliciting feedback from patients through the CAREinMIND program ‘You Said’ is one of the most exciting client engagement strategies I have come across. It is something that has been co-designed by patients, clients and peak bodies and I think it is absolutely amazing. It will really revolutionise what is happening with mental health services.
Read the full article from page 6.
