Hi I'm Deeta
I work in hard-to-get places
I work as a Child and Adolescent psychiatrist in under-resourced and hard-to-reach places such as juvenile and adult prisons, regional mental health services, and remote Indigenous communities.
These environments have highlighted how important a good grounding in trauma-informed care is for our clients, as well as ourselves, as we navigate the complexity and challenges in our work.
Drawing from this background, I have developed a program called Tracking Better®. This program applies the principles of Stephen Porges Polyvagal Theory to better manage stress, dysregulation and learn to regulate and ground in an effective way.
I also have the great pleasure of teaching these skills as a lecturer at the University of Melbourne and Swinburne University to the up and coming child psychiatrists and psychologists.
Bringing trauma-informed care to mental health services
Currently, my focus is on collaborating with health services to share my expertise and train fellow mental health professionals.
We work on the dual level of teaching the clinician how to track and manage their own stress, and then apply these learnings to assist children, youth and families with their own stress and emotilnal dysretulation.
This includes bringing a developmental approach to the different ways children and young people need to be supported by staff in their stress and emotional regulation.
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Skill transformation as the end-goal of training
Most services around the country have had a huge turnover in staff as a result of the Covid experience and have an urgent need to upskill juniour staff in hands on clinical caare.
Our experience is that the standard practice of a single workshop or online course is not enough to translate into upskilled clinical practice.
We have found that a 3 way blended learning of face to face workshop, online mobile phone micro lesson daily training with interactive gamification and monthly clinical group supervision is the magic combination to translate new learning into clinical practice.