From the CEO
It is now five months since we launched our new trading name, One Door Mental Health, and the change has been universally approved. The confusion about whether we just served people with schizophrenia and their carers or all mental illnesses has been clarified by this name change. Our commitment to continue to serve those with severe and persistent mental illness has not changed, nor has our commitment to high quality services. We are the same organisation, with the same people working every day to improve the lives of people with mental illness and their carers.
One thing that has been affected by our change from an Association to a Company limited by guarantee is our membership. As an association we had close to 5,000 memberships. With the change we needed people to agree to become a member of the Company. Whilst this has gone well, we are still under 500 members of the Company. It is a very simple process to become a member, just fill in a form. The only cost to members will be if we need to wind the organisation up and we have debts, even then the individual member liability is restricted to $1, and we have no intention to ever wind up. I would encourage you to get your family, your friends, your acquaintances to become members. Advocacy is still the core business of One Door and the power of our advocacy has always been in our large membership.
A final matter that is critically important is the NDIS. One of the programs that will be affected, indeed it will cease to exist, as a consequence of the roll out of the NDIS is the national carer respite program. We fought for many years for carers of a person with mental illness to have access to respite services and were finally successful about eight years ago. This will now go. It is unacceptable and we have launched a petition to Minister Porter which can be accessed at:
change.org Petition to Minister Porter - Save Carer Respite Services
Please consider adding your name to the many who have already signed it.
Rob Ramjan | CEO
To read more from the July 2017 eNews, click here.