Strengthening Your Frontline: Skills for Support Workers

Your Support Workers are the face of your organisation — their skills, confidence, and professionalism directly shape client satisfaction, retention, and outcomes. Yet the role comes with enormous complexity: diverse clients, varied settings, and often working alone to handle challenging situations in real time.

This half-day workshop introduces Support Workers to the Bower Place framework — a proven approach to managing boundaries, delivering ethically sound services, navigating difficult situations, and reporting with accuracy and confidence. Participants leave with practical tools and problem-solving strategies they can use immediately.

When Support Workers have clarity about their role in the broader system, they make better decisions, protect organisational reputation, and improve client outcomes — all of which is good for your business.

Who should attend?

Support Workers across community services, mental health, NDIS, health, education, and aged care.

Where: Bower Place, 145 South Terrace, Adelaide

When: Friday 17 October 2025

Time: 9.30am – 1.00pm

Cost: $200 + GST = $220

Certificate of Completion Issued

Bower Place (1986)

Bower Place is a twenty-first century knowledge organisation with expertise in all forms of high and complex (support) needs in mental health, human services, education, and justice, especially in paediatric and perinatal mental health. Bower Place has deep clinical and system knowledge and an intimate grasp of the constraints this complicated relationship presents for agencies and practitioners.

Bower Place develops protocols, facilitates research, conducts training, and delivers services in high-end clinical practice and case management in psychology, psychiatry, social work, family therapy, dispute resolution and NDIS Specialist Support Coordination.

Bower Place is physically located in Adelaide with national and international reach including training psychologists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists throughout India. Bower Place’s global electronic delivery of training and therapeutic practice is through the Complex Needs Clinic (CNC) which is a high and complex needs teaching clinic that takes a unique approach -providing in-situ training for beginning and qualified practitioners in high-end therapeutic practice.

Bower Place has partners in Australia, India, and Europe, and a major involvement in the development of software for therapeutic practice and service delivery across education, human services and health. Bower Place has made a commitment to developing services and training in the cross-border Riverland region of SA, Victoria, and NSW. Integral to this is the flexible use of sophisticated technology for hybrid face-to-face and electronic delivery.

Bower Place is a Registered Training Organization with programmes across Australia and links to numerous European and Australian Universities.

In Australia, bower(schools) delivers clinical practice and systemic training to leadership and teachers in schools across the State, Independent and Catholic education systems. Bower Place is currently dealing with schools, disability, and violence and the application of the Disability Discrimination Act.

Bower Place holds significant Intellectual Property developed from research in working with complex human matters and symptoms and has a subscription-based knowledge portal, bower(knowledge), and consults to a range of organisations providing advice, protocols and skills training in the field of human services.

Presenters:

Melissa Hopper: Bower Place Practitioner: Social Worker

Melissa is a systemically trained Accredited Mental Health Social Worker and Family Therapist, with a particular interest in working with individuals and families with high and complex support needs.

Melissa has over ten years of clinical, professional and therapeutic experience working in private, government and non-government roles within the child, adolescent and adult mental health, disability, health, family and child-care services.

Melissa is a practitioner in the Bower Place Complex Needs Clinic, working therapeutically with individuals, couples, and families that present with a wide range of problems, symptoms and challenges.

Melissa assists in training practitioners at all levels of experience and expertise in the Bower Place Complex Needs Clinic.

John Karatzas: Bower Place Practitioner: Social Worker and Specialist Support Coordinator

John is a family therapy trained Accredited Mental Health Social Worker specialising in the area of multi-symptom, multi-problem, multi-system complexity.

Based in the Bower Place Complex Needs Clinic, John works with adults, children, adolescents, individuals, couples and families with a wide range of presenting problems including mental illness, addictions, emotional dysregulation, disability, relationship problems and other challenges.

John has extensive knowledge and experience of NDIS and its intersection with health, education, criminal justice and the mental health systems.

Michelle Lindblom: Bower Place General Manager: Family Therapist and Specialist Support Coordinator

A family therapy and systemically trained educator and practitioner with 40+ years’ experience at the hard-end of high and complex (support) needs, major mental health, addictions, disability, violence, and homelessness.

Michelle coordinates the Bower Place clinical teaching programme in India, and the Bower Place development programme in Riverland South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria.

Michelle leads bower(training), manages the Bower Place RTO, all VET programmes, and co-ordinates the Bower Place Family Therapy and Systemic Practice Training Programme.

Michelle is an NDIS expert and knows every constraint and boundary in its application to disability and schools, health, criminal justice, and mental health. Michelle has a powerful record working with culturally and linguistically diverse people and in the Aboriginal community.

Feedback from Last Workshop

“Engaging, great content”

“All of it was helpful”

“The facilitators were engaging”

“Thank you for a great session”

Host or Publisher Bower Place