Kedesh Rehabilitation Servics (KRS) has developed in the direction of becoming a learning and training organisation for university students and the Drug And Alcohol sector, maintaining a treatment focus. This required increased involvement from community based stakeholders, other agencies, the South Eastern Sydney Illawarra Area Health Service, and links with education and training organisations such as the University of Wollongong and TAFE colleges.

Internship Programme

KRS currently accepts psychology students from the University of Wollongong psychology undergraduate degree to participate in the KRS Internship Programme. Two intakes are conducted each year accepting 8 students per intake exposing a total of 16 interns in a 12 month time span.

Models such as the KRS provide enormous benefits in a number of areas including:

• Increasing in the number of psychologists with skills and an interest in drug and alcohol issues, with a particular focus on patients with concurrent mental health conditions
• Providing psychology undergraduates with training in drug and alcohol issues and dual diagnosis, with a primary focus on counselling

MISU Training

More recently KRS and the Network of Alcohol and Drug Agencies (NADA) have collaborated in the development of a program to build capacity of residential NGO drug and alcohol treatment agencies to better manage clients with mental health and drug and alcohol issues.

The Mental Illness and Substance Use (MISU) program is designed to provide individualised and supported training to meet the needs of staff and management of an organisation. The emphasis is on promoting organisational change in the way complex clients are assessed, treated and understood.

KRS has been funded by the Department of Health and Ageing, under the Service Improvement Delivery Initiative and NADA to roll out this project to 14 residential services between January 2008 and November 2010.

The capacity building project works with staff to elicit attitudes, confidence and skill sets in working with this client group. Training is then delivered over a set number of structured training hours that address the above findings. Resources and exercises are provided for staff to continue learning in the clinical setting. The project also works with the organisations’ management to review and amend operational policies, procedures and practices.

Some of the topics covered include, but are not limited to the following:

• Duty of Care
• CBT
• Motivational Interviewing
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Borderline Personality Disorder
• Suicide
• Self harm
• Self care
• Sleep hygiene
• Journal writing
• Goal setting
• Problematic relating styles

To take advantage of this training opportunity contact NADA.