Assessment task 1: Annotated Bibliography
- McKenna, B., Fernbacher, S., Furness, T., & Hannon, M. (2015). “Cultural brokerage” and beyond: piloting the role of an urban Aboriginal Mental Health Liaison Officer. BMC Public Health, 15(1), 881.
In this article, it analyses the impact of the role of an urban Aboriginal Mental Health Liaison Officer (AMHLO) on mental health conditions of Indigenous clients. The article aimed to explain the improvement of the role of the clients seeking mental health services as it would offer a paradigm for additional mental health provisions. It uses explanatory case study through mixed method. A semi-structured interview is conducted with important stakeholders having direct experience with the role of the AMHLO to obtain perceptions of all the stakeholders with ethical consent taken from the Melbourne Health Office for Research. The study focused on the role of AMHLO directed at the Northern Area Mental Health Services (NAMHS) which allowed McKenna et al. (2015) to understand the change between an urban medical and mental health service that is vital for the enhancement of mental health conditions of Aboriginal communities.
The article is effective for the chosen research topic as the article suggest that the AMHLO must attain resilience in pilot phase to methodically focus on the numerous complex requirements of Aboriginal clients and engage intrinsically to provide comprehensive consultation and mental health literacy at the facility. The key limitation of the article is that is has restricted its research on experimental role of Aboriginal health worker with purposive sampling of limited participants. The article might not be beneficial for this topic as it did not focus on the perspective of AMHLO and ways in which they can develop quality of service engagement delivered by the mental health provision to Aboriginal communities.