Cobar’s new wellness coordinator, Wendy Liu, has been busy getting around talking to and meeting as many locals as he can.
Mr Liu is employed by the Outback Division of General Practice and works out of the Cobar Primary Health Care Centre.
Taking over the duties of the previous Sui-cide Prevention Coordinator, Mr Liu said his role will be centred on overall wellness which includes having a major focus on suicide pre-vention.
“Many activities can be involved in mental health, it all depends on what the community likes,” Mr Liu said.
“My role is not a clinical role, it’s to coordi-nate training and workshops and focus on early intervention and education.
“I don’t have patients. I work with the com-munity members.”
In the past few weeks Mr Liu has been talk-ing to various people in the community in-cluding youth officers, high school represent-atives, police, landholders, mine workers and staff from various clinical agencies.
“I’ve been gathering data and doing re-search on what’s needed and asking what sort of workshops and education is needed for this town.
“The TAFE recently ran a Statement of Attainment for Mental Health Awareness.
“I went to that and my goal was to meet the people attending to make connections and hopefully set up a network.
“I’m trying to meet as many people as pos-sible to gather information about the commu-nity’s needs.”
He said with mental health not being “a popular topic of conversation” he’s keen to work with local groups like Batyr to break down the stigma surrounding mental health.
Mr Lui said he’d like to help set up some youth mental health programs as funding is currently available for youth events.
He’s also working on getting the word out on what services are available via social me-dia, and setting up a Cobar specific page of information.
“There’s a lot of help out there, it’s just knowing where to look for it.”
