In Conversations with Nathan Dart

31 Oct 2024

This month we had the pleasure of speaking with Nathan Dart, Director of Nursing for Metro North Mental Health (MNMH), Brisbane. Nathan shares his insights highlighting the crucial leadership qualities needed to drive positive change within the mental health landscape. Here’s what he told us:

What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the mental health sector?

The mental health sector across Australia is currently facing many challenges, but in my view the biggest issue is workforce. The global employment competition for experienced mental health staff for all professions is significant. Many states and territories across Australia have substantial investment programs into mental health and alcohol & other drugs programs and services. As leaders in the mental health sector, balancing workforce supply to meet our activity demands is a daily challenge. This investment is combined with the number of mental health professional leaving the sector due to retirement or private sector opportunities.

The COVID pandemic has also contributed to our workforce challenges with a reasonable number of staff bringing forward their retirement dates due to the workload and acuity.

Drawing from your experience, what advice would you offer to healthcare professionals and the public on better engaging in meaningful conversations about mental health challenges?

As Healthcare professionals it is important to be extremely open, transparent and compassionate when discussing and addressing mental health challenges. We cannot underestimate the value of including the lived and living experience workforce within not only mental health service delivery, but the broader healthcare context.

We need to be inclusive in the leadership structure of all services to include our lived and living experience colleagues and embark on system reform that is truly codesigned.

We need everyone in our community to be backing and promoting campaigns like “Shatter the Stigma”. We must tackle Stigma.

Services need to provide equity of access and treatment that is responsive to the diverse needs of our communities.

What do you think are the most crucial leadership qualities needed to drive positive change in the mental health sector, especially when it comes to promoting open conversations?

Resilience, compassion, listening, challenging the norm and using our First Nations skills. The lived and living experience workforce need to be aligned to make a difference.

We also need to promote and embed a Restorative Just and Learning Culture, something I envisioned as easy, but which is hard, uncomfortable, and challenging.