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Graduate Diploma in Adolescent Health and Wellbeing review and report
Andrea Krelle, Royal Children's Hospital & Veronica Dempsey, recipient of the Silk Miller Scholarship
 The talk was opened by Andrea Krelle, from the Centre of Adolescent Health, who talked about efforts to bring together professionals from a wide range of disciplines – doctors, teachers, nurses, police, occupational therapists – for orientation on adolescent health. She highlighted the desperate need of these experts to have a chance to engage in dialogue, exchange experiences, and undertake critical reflection about their own performance. She stressed the fact that police in particular are often challenged by very difficult situations when working with adolescents, and are not always well supported either within or without their workplace.
Veronica Dempsey (pictured right) then talked about working with adolescents from the perspective of an operations policewoman working in a regional police station some distance from access to any adolescent mental health services. She felt that the Graduate Diploma in Adolescent Health had been valuable, as it provided the opportunity for networking with practitioners from a variety of different fields that could involve working with adolescents. Police in Portland are now increasingly looking at the bigger picture when working with young offenders and victims – at the environment and social impacts on the latter’s lives. This enables police to respond in a more sensitive way, and to make more referrals to other agencies in an attempt to keep young offenders out of the courts and back into school. Police are also working to engage with the community more, in order to be seen as people, not just police. Recidivism can now be seen to be decreasing.
The question was raised as to what Rotary could do to help within the community – food for future thought.
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This week our members Trevor Dymond and John Hinrichs will share with us their study, career, family life, special interests and what motivated them to join Rotary..JPG)
