The Community Mental Health and Wellbeing Sector in Queensland faces significant recruitment challenges, exacerbated by increasing mental health demands due to various crises including the cost-of-living crisis, housing pressures, the COVID-19 pandemic, and natural disasters. In response, the Queensland Alliance for Mental Health (QAMH) and the Queensland Government have developed the Community Mental Health and Wellbeing Workforce Strategy 2024-2029.

This pioneering strategy aims to guide workforce planning, policy direction, and funding priorities over five years. Its vision is to create a contemporary, person-led, and culturally safe workforce equipped to meet Queenslanders' mental health needs across the care continuum.

The strategy outlines 19 key priorities under three pillars:

Qualifications and Training: Focusing on modernizing core qualifications, establishing traineeships, improving professional development access, enhancing leadership qualifications, and standardizing the workforce.
Attraction and Retention: Enhancing employment conditions, promoting the sector as an attractive career choice, increasing qualification accessibility, enhancing organizational diversity, maximizing local expertise, developing career pathways, and fostering worker wellbeing.
System Enablers: Ensuring adequate resource allocation, systematic workforce data collection, enhancing sector value, embedding lived experience and First Nations perspectives, and implementing collaborative oversight and accountability.
Developed through extensive state-wide consultation, including regional forums, surveys, and focus groups for lived experience and CALD communities, the strategy emphasizes stakeholder buy-in, system-wide collaboration, lived experience integration, and advocacy for adequate resourcing. An expert Project Advisory Committee provided guidance throughout the process. The strategy aligns with state and federal initiatives to ensure comprehensive reform.

This presentation will offer valuable insights for mental health leaders driving workforce reform and sustainability, providing practical ideas for strategy development and implementation. Queensland's experience serves as a potential model for other regions undertaking similar initiatives to address the critical challenges facing the mental health workforce.

Three Key Learnings:
1. The importance of a comprehensive, co-designed workforce strategy in addressing the challenges facing the community mental health and wellbeing sector, particularly in recruitment, retention, and skill development.

2. Practical approaches to developing and implementing a workforce strategy, including stakeholder engagement, cross-sector collaboration, and alignment with broader state and federal initiatives.

3. Insights into specific actionable priorities across qualifications, attraction and retention, and system enablers that can drive sustainable workforce reform in the mental health sector.