Grow Your Own Non-Clinical Community Mental Health Workforce — Maranoa region Working Session

The community mental health and wellbeing sector is under sustained pressure. Community services organisations across Queensland report the same pattern: rising demand and thinning capacity to meet it. In the 2025 QCOSS State of the Sector survey, 81% of services reported increased demand for what they provide over the previous six months, while 48% reported difficulty finding and keeping appropriately skilled and qualified staff.

In South West Queensland, these pressures are amplified by geography. Health care and social assistance is the largest employing industry in the Darling Downs–Maranoa region, yet services consistently struggle to attract and retain workers in communities where housing is scarce, training requires leaving the region, and chronic vacancies leave remaining staff carrying unsustainable loads. In March 2026, 24 workers from 15 organisations across South West Queensland came together in Roma to name these challenges, and to start building local solutions.

Queensland Alliance for Mental Health is working with the region to develop the Grow Your Own Non-Clinical Community Mental Health Workforce Plan (Maranoa region) , a locally designed blueprint to create sustainable pathways into non-clinical mental health roles for First Nations peoples, multicultural communities, people with lived and living experience, and local community members.

This is not a consultation. It is a working session to set priorities for action.

Contact the host of Maranoa Grow Your Own Non-Clinical Community Mental Health Workforce Plan

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