Courtney is a passionate and enthusiastic Mental Health Professional with six years experience working with young people across prevention, early intervention and recovery stages. With a background in psychology and her own lived experience as a mental health consumer, Courtney understands the unique intersections of theoretical and real-world applications of health practices and is passionate about creating safe spaces where all voices can be heard and consumers are empowered to actively participate in their treatment and recovery plans. Courtney is constantly striving for best-practice revolving around trauma-informed and recovery-oriented principles and is often championing new ideas to revolutionise how consumers engage and interact with the mental health system in an effort to maintain autonomy and dignity in the pursuit of safety and improved consumer experiences. Courtney currently supports the work of COORDINARE, the South Eastern NSW Primary Health Network, as part of the Mental Health Commissioning team where she drives the collaboration of peer networks across the region to define and facilitate the implementation of the Lived Experience (Peer) Work Framework in an effort to further integrate Peer Work across the healthcare system.

Chris Scott is one of the Mental Health Clinical Nurse Consultants (CNC) with the Illawarra Shoalhaven Mental Health Ambulance Police Project (MHAPP). The MHAPP offers a community mental health assessment that is available to emergency services in the area. This revolutionary program is providing an option other than the emergency department for the mental health consumer.

Kristina is a dual registered paramedic in Australia and England with extensive experience in both clinical practice and paramedic education. Kristina’s experience of increasingly attending paediatric mental health cases, accompanied by the lack of age- appropriate screening tools, led her to conducting research to explore existing paediatric mental health screening and assessment tools utilised across the wider emergency care setting. She hopes that one day her research will contribute to assisting ambulance services across Australia to adopt paediatric mental health screening and assessment tools, and to further advocate for mental health reforms to be inclusive of paramedic practice.

Alison Horne is the Community Engagement Team Leader (NSW/ACT) for Fortem Australia. Fortem provides evidence-based, comprehensive, and integrated wellbeing support to first responders and their families/inner circles.

Kate has served in the NSW Police for just under 20 years before "melting down" unceremoniously in the change room. Never did I think PTSD would happen to me! 11 years later...I am a trained yoga teacher and my co-teacher is my Assistance Dog Gidget. It has been a long and exhausting road to get back to some degree of wellness and yoga and meditation has been a huge part of my recovery and I believe (had I let it) it may have enabled me to continue in a career I loved until I couldn't do it anymore.

Eugene has more than 40 years experience serving the health and community sector in a range of settings in the UK and Australia. Eugene's career started in 1979 as a mental health nurse and he has since had experience in front line, management and executive roles in mental health, disability, child protection, homelessness and workers compensation. Eugene is a strong advocate of challenging convention and disrupting the status quo in the pursuit of developing socially innovative solutions to address deep-rooted problems with disadvantage and understands the need for community, government, non-government and business to work together collaboratively to establish a flourishing ecosystem that supports wellbeing. As part of the Planning and Performance team with COORDINARE, he works to ensure the right mix of primary and community-based interventions are commissioned to deliver improved health outcomes for people with mental health conditions.