Title: I want to change my treating team
Producer: Independent Mental Health Advocacy
Name of speaker: Wanda Bennetts (all speech content)
Speech Content: Do you want to change your treating team? You might not know it, but the Victorian Mental Health and Wellbeing Act says you have rights that mental health services must respect.
Independent Mental Health Advocacy, or IMHA, helps people to learn about and use their rights. This video is a guide to your rights and options if you want to change your treating team.
There are some common reasons for changing your treating team. These are that you may prefer or feel more comfortable with someone from a specific gender, that you may have a clash of personality or communication issues with a staff member, that the change would be more helpful for your mental health, that you may disagree with a clinician's opinion and prefer another person to take over your treatment, that a staff member is not respecting your rights.
The law says that you have the right to make or participate in decisions about your treatment and have your individual needs respected and responded to. This includes who is treating you, so you can make a request. However, you should be aware that the services response may be influenced by the staff and resources available.
When it comes to making the request, you can ask any staff member or speak with the manager of the service. Some tips for that conversation are, make a plan about what you want to say and what you want to ask, learn about your rights using IMHA’s know your rights fact sheets, ask for the services policy on requests to change your treating team.
Sometimes your first try isn’t successful. If that happens, you can ask for a review of the decision about changing the staff member, talk to the staff member about your concerns and your expectations of them from now on, or get a second psychiatric opinion if you disagree with your current psychiatrist.
If you would like to learn more or talk to an IMHA advocate, you can call us on 1300 947 820, hear a recording of your rights on 1800 959 353, see our website on www.imha.vic.gov.au, or see our fact sheets which should be available at your service.
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