Key people

Helen is responsible for leading the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health's national to local strategy. She has a vast knowledge of Health/Human/Community Services with a combination of over 30 years management experience, identifying service gaps, developing community partnerships advocating for ‘joined up solutions to local issues’. With extensive experience in child and family mental health, training and development, action research, community consultation, community development and capacity building initiatives, and ‘lived experience’ engagement in the process of co-design.

Ben is responsible for leading the development of resources and tools for parents and families on infant and child mental health. A strong focus of his role is to improve communication and partnerships between families, educators and health service providers. A qualified Occupational Therapist, he has held positions in a variety of mental health and child and family services across Australia and the United Kingdom. This clinical experience has seen him focus on supporting rural and remote families as part of a telehealth assessment, therapy and capacity building service. Ben also has extensive experience leading projects of a complex nature, including: leading the design and delivery of national mental health promotion projects and activities that seek to improve child mental health literacy in families; development and delivery of an education focused workforce development framework and training package for staff as part of the Be You bushfire response program; large scale Telehealth projects which supported Royal Far West’s clinical work in rural and remote areas of Australia; and the redesign of an NSW Health funded complex developmental assessment service, known as the Paediatric Developmental Program (PDP). Ben is also a trained facilitator of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program and enjoys facilitating this program in his local community.

Dr Goodyear leads development and implementation of the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health's research and evaluation strategy, and the Research and Evaluation team. She specialises in codesign and capacity building of research and evaluation methodologies to support the translation of evidence into practice. Melinda has a background in psychology, family resilience and neuroscience, and 20+ years experience working as an implementation scientist and researcher of intergenerational vulnerability in families. A Senior Research Fellow at Monash University, she is particularly interested in understanding how to support and promote mental health and wellbeing among family members. Dr Goodyear has an established academic track record and demonstrated ability to conduct complex quantitative, qualitative and mixed method studies with highly vulnerable and marginalised people, including children. With 75+ peer reviewed publications (including 60+ journals), she has been awarded >$6 million dollars in competitive research funding to explore the needs of families where there is a mental illness, including workforce development initiatives with mental health and social services to address those needs. Melinda’s broad work covers: supporting organisations and workforces in understanding the program theory behind key outcomes they want to achieve; understanding the evidence base from academic literature, practitioners and families; practice design and implementation of evidence based interventions; knowledge translation and organisational change approaches, including the building of self-determination in practitioners and families; and evaluation design and quality improvement approaches.