The Individual Psycho-social Rehabilitation Support Service, also known
as IPRSS is a recovery oriented rehabilitation and support service for
people who experienced mental illness. Services are provided jointly by
government and non-government mental health providers in a person's home and
local community, and can be accessed in the metropolitan and country regions.
So the IPRSS package benefits the consumers because it's very flexible and it can
be in their home or within the community.
It meets them where their needs are, so whether that's daily support,
or once a week, or once a fortnight
and the aim of the IPRSS package is to develop goals to support consumers in their recovery
There's a huge range of things that a support worker can do to support a consumer,
and that can include
looking for more appropriate accommodation for the consumer, it can include
looking for work or pursuing educational opportunities.
It can be
day-to-day living and developing household management skills,
with the cleaning and cooking.
It's about social connectedness and getting out into the community and engaging
with the different programs that are on offer.
When I was first met by my IPRSS support worker,
I was really struggling
to make sense of
my experience thus far, and this was over five years or so
with the mental health system,
and I found that, what I was met by
when I was first met by an IPRSS worker,
was exactly what I needed.
And I was quite amazed at how exactly it was what I needed.
I guess I had renewed faith in the human race.
They were so ideally suited and trained and capable,
and I mean, it's easy to be empathetic toward somebody
but to actually know
exactly what kind of advice
to give them
if you're helping someone who's in a situation,
or difficult circumstance
the collaborative recovery model
is so obviously to me,
the product of so much hard work and genuine effort.
I think the major benefits to the program is to initially
instil hope into a consumer who has lost hope basically
as a starting point.
and then supporting the person to
find and lead the most fulfilling possible life that they can,
and just generally have a very happy, fulfilling life.
The IPRSS worker meets with the consumer,
whenever the consumer has the need to meet up.
But they also meet together with the consumer and the mental health care worker
and perhaps family members, on at least a three monthly basis,
if not sooner if that's more appropriate, and when they meet up
at those three monthly reviews
they have a look at where things are at, how things are traveling
with all the parties concerned,
is the consumer working towards goals that are meaningful to them
and how else can we support the consumer.
As far as recommending an IPRSS worker, or the IPRSS program itself,
in my experience,
I was absolutely amazed at how capable they were and how helpful they were.
They were really, genuinely very helpful, and consistently so.
They're very dedicated.
The emphasis is definitely on the fact that they're the consumer's goals
not goals that we choose, or would like to see them achieve.
They're their goals, and we will support them to achieve those goals.
Some of my goals, that my IPRSS worker helped me set
were getting back to nature,
obtaining some form of meaningful work
and continuing with some study that I had begun and made some progress with.
As a mother with a son who's got schizophrenia,
the IPRSS program has made a huge difference to my son.
For the first time he's actually being able to be on his own
and start looking after himself more.
It's given me a lot of worry free time now.
I work twelve hours a day, so I can't always be there for him
and the fact that I've got people that are ringing him,
prompting him for medication,
coming around daily to come and visit him has been a huge relief for all of us.
It's made a lot of difference with the relationship with my son and myself,
because before it was becoming very clinical where, whenever I was going around
it was constantly talking about what he needs to do and
we lost that sort of mother-son bond for quite a while
and I felt it was stressful for myself, as well as for my son because
every time I'd go around, I'd just seemed like I was nagging,
do this, do that, or you have to do this, and
since the IPRSS program as been in effect with with my son,
it's just given us a freedom to be mum and son again.