United effort connect carers to their community

A PROJECT to connect carers to their local communities has kicked goals for Beechworth Health Service and its partners. The program aimed to reduce isolation, improve health and wellbeing as well as connection started in January this year with project coordinator Tanya Grant appointed to lead the project. Beechworth Health Service teamed up with Quercus Beechworth, Chiltern Neighbourhood House, Yackandandah Community Centre, Indigo Shire Council, Changing Minds Support Group and Indigo North Health. The project supported with a $40,000 grant last year from Carers Victoria funded by the Victorian Government wraps up at the end of this month. Covering Yackandandah, Beechworth and Chiltern communities, Ms Grant said the project team learned about carers in the area as well as from visits to Rutherglen and Tangambalanga. Ms Grant said a co-design model engaged all stakeholders where carers had a voice in the program. “Project partners all worked together beautifully and have achieved more than what we hoped for,” she said. Ms Grant said carers brought together over morning teas held in the three neighbourhood centres had a chance to chat to provider representatives from support organisations such as Services Australia, Gateway Health, Carer Gateway, and Mental Health and Well Being Connect. “Carers had indicated they lacked time for activities important to them, such as health and well-being and being active, and we set up activities for them at the Neighbourhood Houses,” she said. “Everything we did had a lens of making sure we kept going back to the advisory or carers’ groups for feedback.” While the project is being undertaken in other parts of Victoria, Ms Grant said one of the outcomes seen in the local project was that many people do not acknowledge themselves as a carer, with an acceptance of being in an expected role. Among outcomes is also an increased connection with the three Indigo Neighbourhood Houses. “These community hubs are going to be pivotal roles moving forward, because they are the ones we're going to make sure the knowledge sits with,” Ms Grant said. Ms Grant said the project with its community development model has seen community-based health services, Neighbourhood Houses, and community coming together to try and make things better for a carer. “It’s been interesting to see how community health-based organisations can work so beautifully with Neighbourhood Houses because each of them play such a pivotal role in people's lives,” she said. “It’s also a social prescribing model looking at a carer holistically, for example around a medical appointment where the medical person should be thinking about you, not just from a medical point of view, but from a social point of view.” Ms Grant said a direct outcome from this project is a carers’ companion being developed for paperwork to be filed in one spot for such things as visits to a medical appointment, a solicitor or accountant.

United effort connect carers to their community

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