The con­tent of this arti­cle dis­cuss­es men­tal health and well­be­ing, and sui­cide. This may trig­ger per­son­al expe­ri­ences of trau­ma and we rec­om­mend read­ing with cau­tion if you are con­cerned. If you need sup­port, please call Life­line on 13 11 14 or the Bush Sup­port Line on 1800 805 391.

When one of our psy­chol­o­gists answers the phone, we have a shared under­stand­ing of what it is like to live and work in the unique and chal­leng­ing envi­ron­ments that you are pas­sion­ate about deliv­er­ing health-relat­ed ser­vices to.

We have an under­stand­ing of the chal­lenges you face due to the remote­ness of loca­tion, cli­mate, staffing, access to resources both pro­fes­sion­al­ly and social­ly, and the dif­fi­cul­ties dis­tance creates. 

We are fre­quent­ly told by our callers this is what makes our ser­vice unique and one of the main rea­sons peo­ple feel safe and com­fort­able to pick up the phone and call us when they need some­one to yarn to and seek sup­port from.

Safe­Side sui­cide pre­ven­tion training

In June 2022, the Men­tal Health and Well­be­ing (MHW) team met face-to-face in Bris­bane to com­mence the roll­out of the Safe­Side sui­cide pre­ven­tion train­ing to a num­ber of the Bush Sup­port Line out-of-hours psychologists.

The Safe­Side Frame­work is a flex­i­ble approach to sui­cide pre­ven­tion that focus­es on recov­ery, rather than tra­di­tion­al meth­ods of assess­ing risk as low, medi­um, or high.

This was the first time many of the MHW team met in per­son and was an oppor­tu­ni­ty for our CRANAplus MHW team and Bush Sup­port Line out-of-hours psy­chol­o­gists to build rela­tion­ships and grow knowl­edge around con­tem­po­rary sui­cide pre­ven­tion prac­tices to bet­ter sup­port our rur­al and remote health workforce. 

Although the Bush Sup­port Line is not fun­da­men­tal­ly a cri­sis ser­vice, it is cru­cial our psy­chol­o­gists remain cur­rent in con­tem­po­rary sui­cide pre­ven­tion prac­tices to sup­port our callers when they are expe­ri­enc­ing thoughts of suicide. 

It is also impor­tant our psy­chol­o­gists share a com­mon lan­guage to dis­cuss clin­i­cal con­cerns when appro­pri­ate to do so.

Knowl­edge was gained regard­ing apply­ing a new frame­work for sui­cide pre­ven­tion, and spend­ing time face-to-face was an invalu­able expe­ri­ence to have a yarn and share experiences. 

As both our CRANAplus MHW team and our out-of-hours Bush Sup­port Line psy­chol­o­gists are based right across Aus­tralia, we are accus­tomed to meet­ing via video con­fer­ence, so it was a treat to share time in the same phys­i­cal space. 

Although we all com­ment­ed that some of us were taller or short­er than we had assumed we would be from our ​‘video’ per­sonas, the time to share our remote clin­i­cal expe­ri­ence on the Bush Sup­port Line and our expe­ri­ences sup­port­ing those at risk of sui­cide, was a valu­able expe­ri­ence to all who were able to attend. 

The MHW team sub­se­quent­ly deliv­ered the Safe­Side sui­cide pre­ven­tion train­ing to the remain­der of the out-of-hours Bush Sup­port Line psy­chol­o­gists via online video train­ing in mid-Sep­tem­ber 2022. 

This means that all our MHW staff, includ­ing psy­chol­o­gists, edu­ca­tion team and admin­is­tra­tion are all trained in the Safe­Side mod­el of sui­cide pre­ven­tion to sup­port our callers with evi­dence-based inter­ven­tions and have gen­er­al con­ver­sa­tions around sui­cide pre­ven­tion using the same prin­ci­ples and language.

Work­ing virtually 

Work­ing remote­ly has become the norm across the world in the last cou­ple of years. At CRANAplus, this has been the norm for the Bush Sup­port Line (for­mer­ly known as the Bush Cri­sis Line) since it was found­ed 25 years ago.

Yet we have not for­got­ten the val­ue of com­ing togeth­er, shar­ing in the impor­tance of pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment, shared expe­ri­ence and build­ing team rela­tion­ships; an expe­ri­ence we each appre­ci­at­ed beyond measure. 

We hope to be able to con­tin­ue to meet face-to-face year­ly to under­take fur­ther learn­ings to sup­port our callers and to build our team relationships.