14/06/2026
🤝 Inter-hospital collaboration boosts child and youth mental health teams 🤝
TCHHS staff and their Queensland Children’s Hospital counterparts are working together to support child and youth mental health services, with a recent trip to Cooktown and Hope Vale providing an insight into the important role of peer work.
The Queensland Children’s Hospital’s Lived Experience Educator Blake Liversage (left) and Director Yasmin Grono (far right), with TCHHS’s Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drugs Service Senior Peer Coordinator Jo Abbatangelo and Clinical Lead Luke Frazer, travelled to Cooktown and Hope Vale recently.
The group was supported by Cooktown-based Lived Experience Peer Worker John Riley on the Hope Vale visit, which Yasmin said was a highlight.
“At Hope Vale we had the opportunity to visit the local Indigenous Art Centre and the Apunipima Wellbeing Centre,” she said.
“We also had the privilege of seeing peer work happening in such an authentic and meaningful way.
“Across a region with such a broad geographic reach, peer workers often rely heavily on their own lived experience, authenticity and the support of the teams around them.
“To be welcomed into communities requires genuine respect, humility and cultural understanding, and these peer workers embody that so naturally.”
