In Western Sydney Area Mental Health Service, N.S.W. there are currently two full time family workers employed to work directly with families affected by parental mental ill health. Another full time family worker is presently being recruited. The parents are registered clients of WSAMHS and are mostly referred by case managers or in-patient unit staff.

The Family Workers work with staff, parents and dependant children to identify issues and how best to address needs. The issues may be questions about parenting capacity, child behaviour problems, advocacy for the child at school, advocacy for the child in case planning, psycho-education, social isolation, development or child protection concerns. The service is mostly home based. Interventions include facilitation of referrals to specialist services, exploration of the impact of the parent mental illness on the family and enhancing parenting strategies around specific behaviour problems. One of the most important strategies is to facilitate communication within families about mental illness and the family's experience and understanding of it.

Group programs for children are run in school holidays and advantage is also taken of camp programs run by other COPMI services [eg Gaining Ground in SWSAMHS].

There are also informal evenings for adolescents with pizza, pool and conversations about themselves and their parents' mental illness.

There are plans for a pilot of an enhanced Positive Parenting Program specifically for parents affected by mental illness.

A partnership has been developed with the Dept of Psychological Medicine of Children's Hospital, Westmead. Dr Adrian Falkov, Staff Specialist Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist and Dr Deborah Finney, Clinical Psychologist work with families and the family workers in a weekly COPMI Clinic. Some of the aims of the clinic are to explore the children's understanding of their parent's mental illness, to facilitate discussion amongst the family members about this, to enhance parent child relationships and clarify issues for intervention by the family workers.

Another important role for the family workers, in conjunction with key colleagues, is to promote awareness about the needs of these families at many levels within the mental health system. It is an ongoing challenge to work towards orienting the adult services to think systematically and routinely about the needs of these children. There are several ways in which this education process is pursued.
· There are education strategies in psychiatric in-patient units and community based services by way of formal presentations and case by case discussion.
· File audits are done intermittently to ascertain the level of recorded awareness of children's needs in files of patients in an acute in-patient setting. The results of these audits are fed back to staff.
· MH staff have participated in a COPMI workshop run by Dr Adrian Falkov, Dr Deborah Finney and the family workers.

The two workers are Committee members of the NSW Network which is a state based organisation (still seeking ratification by NSW Dept Health) which has as its aim the support of COPMI Families and COPMI workers.