VMHPAA Presents at the International Conference on Human Resilience
- Shane Warren
- May 28
- 8 min read
PUBLIC RESPONSE
For Immediate Release
28th May 2026
Building a Resilient Mental Health System: A Broad-Church Pathway to Care
It was an exciting moment for the Vocational Mental Health Practitioners Association Australia when our Chair, Shane Warren, presented an accepted paper for discussion at the International Conference on Human Resilience: Navigating Life Changes & Challenges, hosted by Hong Kong Shue Yan University.
The conference brought together researchers, practitioners, educators and policy thinkers to explore resilience across individual, family, community and system levels. For VMHPAA, this was a valuable opportunity to contribute to an international conversation about the future of mental health systems and the role of a diverse, accountable and accessible workforce.
Shane’s presentation, Building a Resilient Mental Health System: A Broad-Church Pathway to Care, argued that a resilient mental health system should not be built by narrowing who is allowed to help. Instead, it should be built by designing clearer, safer and more connected pathways into care.
The presentation was supported by VMHPAA’s discussion paper, A Broad-Church Pathway to Care: Building a Resilient, Accessible and Accountable Mental Health System, which expands the argument in greater detail.
The core idea is simple: A resilient mental health system is not a narrower gate. It is a better-designed pathway.
The presentation invited policymakers, professional associations, educators and practitioners to think carefully about how public safety and access to care can be held together. It is not enough to protect the public by narrowing entry points if the result is that people are left waiting, priced out, geographically isolated or unsure where to seek help.
VMHPAA’s position is not that standards should be weakened. Quite the opposite. The argument is that standards should be intelligent, proportionate and connected to scope of practice, supervision, continuing professional development, ethical conduct, referral pathways and consumer transparency.
In short: safety matters. Access matters. A resilient system must be mature enough to hold both.
You can download the presentation slides and the supporting discussion paper here:
Download the PowerPoint: "Building a Resilient Mental Health System"
Download the discussion paper: "A Braod-Church Pathway to Care"
The text as presented:
Building a Resilient Mental Health System: A Broad-Church Pathway to Care
Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to present today.
My name is Shane Warren, and I am presenting on behalf of the Vocational Mental Health Practitioners Association Australia.
Today I want to make a simple argument: a resilient mental health system is not a narrower gate. It is a better-designed pathway.
Across many countries, including Australia, mental health systems are under pressure. Demand is rising. Services are stretched. Workforce shortages are real. Cost barriers are real. Waitlists are real. And many people are finding that help is either too expensive, too far away, too clinical, too delayed, or simply too hard to find.
The question, then, is not only how we build more specialist services. That matters, of course. But the deeper question is: how do we design systems that can hold more people, earlier, more safely, and in more places?
The access problem is familiar across many systems.
People are seeking mental health support in greater numbers, but the available pathways are not always clear, affordable, timely or culturally appropriate.
Some people need specialist psychiatric or psychological care. Some need structured counselling. Some need early intervention, peer connection, psychoeducation, coaching, family support, or culturally responsive community-based help.
The difficulty is that many systems are designed around the most visible points of need: diagnosis, treatment, crisis and specialist intervention.
Those points are essential. But between informal support and specialist clinical care sits a large and very human middle space.
It is the space where people are distressed, but not yet in crisis. Where they need support, but may not need specialist treatment. Where timely care could prevent deterioration.
A resilient system needs to know what to do with that middle space.
In policy conversations, especially around regulation, we often hear a very understandable concern: public safety.
And public safety must sit at the centre of any mental health system.
People seeking support may be vulnerable. Poor practice can cause harm. Unclear titles, inconsistent training, weak accountability, or inadequate supervision can undermine public trust.
So the question is not whether we need standards. We do.
The question is what kind of standards create both safety and access.
There is a policy trap here.
If safety is pursued only by narrowing recognition to a small number of professional groups, then regulation can unintentionally reduce access.
A system may become neater on paper, but less reachable in real life.
That is not resilience. That is administrative tidiness.
When we talk about resilience, we often talk about individuals.
We ask whether a person can adapt, recover, keep going, or rebuild after adversity.
But systems also need resilience.
A resilient system is not simply one that asks exhausted workers and services to cope harder.
A resilient system has elasticity. It can absorb increased demand. It can direct people to the right level of support. It can escalate care when risk increases. It can preserve continuity across different types of help.
In mental health, this matters because human distress rarely presents in neat categories.
Someone may be grieving, but not clinically unwell. Someone may be anxious, but still functioning. Someone may be lonely, overwhelmed, culturally displaced, burnt out, financially stressed, or caring for others.
They may not need a hospital. They may not need a psychiatrist. They may not even know whether they need therapy.
But they do need somewhere to go.
The broad-church pathway to care begins with one core idea: mental health support is not delivered by one profession alone.
That does not mean all practitioners are the same. They are not.
Scope matters. Training matters. Supervision matters. Risk competence matters. Ethics matter.
The work of a psychiatrist is not the same as the work of a counsellor. The work of a psychologist is not the same as the work of a peer worker. The work of a community practitioner is not the same as the work of a crisis clinician.
But difference does not mean irrelevance.
A resilient system recognises difference and designs around it.
It asks: what can each part of the workforce safely do? Where does each practitioner sit in the care pathway? What standards should apply? When should referral occur? How do we make scope clear to the public?
This is what I mean by a broad-church pathway.
It is not an “anything goes” model. It is an argument for intelligent inclusion.
The model I am proposing is a pathway, not a professional hierarchy.
Some people need specialist psychiatric or psychological care. Some need structured counselling or psychotherapy. Some need skilled early intervention. Some need peer connection, psychoeducation, coaching, family support, or culturally responsive community care.
A resilient system helps people move between these levels rather than forcing them to wait at one locked gate.
The pathway should not be a rigid ladder where people must climb in one direction.
It should be more like a well-designed transport system.
People need different routes at different times. Some need rapid escalation. Some need ongoing maintenance. Some need a local stop before they need a hospital. Some need help returning to ordinary life after specialist care.
In that kind of system, the goal is not to protect professional territory.
The goal is to protect the person.
This has particular relevance for vocationally trained mental health practitioners.
In Australia, vocational practitioners often work close to the ground.
They work in community settings, private practice, family services, disability support, aged care, youth work, regional areas, peer-informed environments, workplace wellbeing, education, supervision groups and early intervention spaces.
They often see people who might otherwise not seek help at all.
These practitioners are not a replacement for specialist clinical services. That point is important.
But they are part of the care ecosystem.
When appropriately trained, supervised, insured, accountable and operating within scope, they can provide accessible and timely support for many people whose needs sit below, beside, or between specialist services.
To remove or marginalise that workforce in the name of safety may produce the opposite of resilience.
It may deepen access gaps. It may increase pressure on already stretched specialist services. It may leave communities with fewer trusted points of entry.
A broad-church model is not an argument against regulation. It is an argument for better regulation.
A resilient mental health system needs safety architecture, not exclusion by default.
By safety architecture, I mean clear scope of practice, transparent qualification pathways, ethical codes, continuing professional development, supervision, complaints mechanisms, referral obligations, risk escalation processes, and consumer-facing information.
These mechanisms allow a diverse workforce to operate safely.
They also protect against two risks at once.
The first risk is unsafe practice.
The second risk is unmet need.
Too often, policy conversations focus only on the first risk. But unmet need is also a safety issue.
Waiting months for care is a safety issue. Not being able to afford support is a safety issue.
Living in a regional area without timely access is a safety issue. Being told, implicitly or explicitly, that your distress does not yet qualify for help is a safety issue.
If systems are only designed for the point at which people become acutely unwell, then we are not building resilience. We are building delayed response.
For policy, this leads to several practical implications.
First, reform should protect the public while preserving access. These are not competing goals. They must be designed together.
Second, standards should be proportionate to scope. Not every practitioner needs the same training because not every practitioner is doing the same work. But every practitioner should be clear, accountable and safe within their role.
Third, vocational and community-based practitioners should be included in system planning, not treated as an afterthought. If they are already doing the work, then the policy task is to strengthen quality, not pretend the work does not exist.
Fourth, supervision and referral pathways should be treated as core infrastructure.
A practitioner who knows when and how to refer is safer than a system that leaves people guessing where to go next.
Finally, consumers need transparency. People should be able to understand a practitioner’s qualifications, professional membership, scope of practice, complaints pathway and referral responsibilities.
These are not radical ideas. They are practical ones.
The challenge is that mental health policy is often shaped in moments of pressure.
When systems are under strain, there can be a temptation to simplify: to define safety narrowly, to recognise only some forms of expertise, to tidy the map by removing complexity.
But human distress is complex. Communities are complex. Workforce ecosystems are complex.
The answer is not to pretend otherwise.
The answer is to design better.
A broad-church pathway to care does not lower the bar. It builds more bars in the right places.
It says that high-risk work requires high-level competence.
It says that early support should be accessible.
It says that different roles should be named clearly.
It says that supervision matters. Scope matters. Referral matters. Accountability matters.
And it says that people should not have to deteriorate before the system knows what to do with them.
So I will close where I began.
A resilient mental health system is not a narrower gate.
It is a wider, safer, better-designed pathway.
It is a system that protects the public without abandoning access. It recognises specialist expertise without dismissing community-based support. It values professional standards without confusing exclusion for safety.
Most importantly, it is a system designed around the person seeking help, not around the comfort of the system itself.
Thank you.
Continue the Conversation
VMHPAA offers this presentation and discussion paper as an invitation to continue the conversation about workforce inclusion, public safety and system-level resilience.
The question is not whether standards matter. They do. The question is how we design standards, pathways and systems that protect the public without narrowing access to care.
Media Contact:
Shane Warren, Chair
Susan Sandy, Secretary
Philip Armstrong, CEO
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