Bellarine Community Health celebrates milestone

BELLARINE Community Health’s (BCH) Youth Services and Wellbeing team have celebrated 10 years of delivering critical services to young people on the Bellarine.
The 10-year anniversary was marked with a special party at the BCH Youth Services site in Drysdale.
Since the establishment of the Youth Services team, staff numbers have grown from three to 24, with clinicians seeing an average of 100 new referrals each month.
“We are incredibly proud of how the Youth Services team has grown over the years,” BCH Youth Services Manager Tanya Fitzpatrick said.
The BCH Youth Services team support young people in many ways including nursing, counselling and mental health, medical, podiatry, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, diet and nutrition and sexual health.
“We’re now supporting young people in multiple outreach sites, but our hub in the school’s precinct in Drysdale provides us with an amazing connection and relationship with the secondary schools, their wellbeing teams, teachers, the students and their parents,” Ms Fitzpatrick said.
The Youth team now also delivers services at secondary schools across Geelong and the Bellarine through the highly successful Doctors in Secondary Schools program.
Since BCH began the Doctors in Secondary Schools program there have been more than 1500 occasion of service with up to 12 appointments per clinic.
Another of the specialist services delivered by the BCH Youth team is a drug program for transgender clients allowing them to access ongoing hormone replacement therapy without needing to go into Geelong.
The BCH Youth Services 10-year celebration recognised the assistance and support of several other organisations including the Primary Health Network, headspace Geelong, BATForce, the City of Greater Geelong and Barwon Child Youth & Family.