What’s important
Every day in everything we do, we are guided by some important values and beliefs.
Our dream as a peak performing organisation is to ‘transform mental health and addictions through fostering strong, compassionate, self-supporting communities’. How we strive for this dream on a day to day basis is guided by some important values and beliefs.
We believe everyone can recover
We genuinely believe everyone can recover, shape their own future and live well. We’re here to do everything we can to support them in that recovery.
Recovery doesn’t mean cure, nor is it an end point. Recovery is a process people undertake to work out how to manage and live with mental illness.
We firmly believe that each person we support will recover and won’t need support from us forever. But we’re here for as long as they need us.
We’re about hope and respect
Hope and respect are at the heart of everything we do, and we want to help people draw on their own inner strength and hopes for the future.
We value diversity and recognise that people come to our service with their own culture, beliefs and practices. It is important to us that they always feel respected and culturally safe.
We deliver personalised support
We’re dedicated to working alongside people to plan support that’s right for them.
We talk to them to get an understanding of their needs and who they’d like to be involved in their journey. Together we create a personalised plan that outlines their goals and how they plan to achieve them. This is their plan and it can be in any form they want – a journal, a mind map or an action plan – whatever works best for them.
Our services are flexible, so if people’s needs change, their support can change too.
Total wellbeing is our goal
We know people’s recovery will be faster and more successful if they focus on living well in all areas of their life. That’s why our ‘Being Well’ strategy plays a big part in shaping how we work every day. We don’t just focus on people’s mental health – total wellbeing is always our goal.
Pathways also endorses the Equally Well position paper, the result of more than 40 organisations working together to take action to improve health outcomes of people with experience of mental health and/or addiction issues.
We actively encourage and support everyone we work with to be healthier, with things like:
We recognise the impact of trauma
We realise trauma may have played a part in people becoming unwell, so we try to recognise the impacts that trauma may have had on them.
We’re committed to doing everything we can to ensure people don’t experience any further trauma from being involved with our services.
We focus on strengths and resilience
We’re more interested in focusing on people’s strengths than their problems or diagnoses.
We support people to develop their strengths, grow positive experiences and identify opportunities for development and sustainable change.
We believe shared stories can inspire
We believe shared stories of success can capture hearts and minds and inspire people in their recovery.
So where people want to share their stories of struggle and success, we want to help share them for the benefit of others.
We value peer support
We value the important role our peer support workforce plays.
Peer support workers have had specialist training in how to use their experience of mental illness to help others on their recovery journey.
Sometimes the unique perspective that a peer support worker has, can make all the difference.
We believe we all own quality
Pathways has a long history of pushing boundaries, being imaginative and leading innovation. We believe the best improvements and innovations occur when we involve everyone in the organisation in determining them.
Our quality and improvement framework provides the over-arching structure for how we approach quality – through involving and including staff, people who use services and family/whānau.
We’re a learning organisation
We are intensely proud of the journey we have taken in shaping our organisation and the mental health sector. However, we recognise that we must keep learning and adapting to continue to provide the best care and support possible.
People are changing, international knowledge is growing and new approaches are being developed. We want to be at the forefront of learning and sharing our knowledge for the betterment of mental health care throughout the world.
We believe our staff are our greatest asset
Every day around the country our staff do ordinary things in extraordinary ways to improve the lives of the people we support.
Each year, through our Trish Glen Award, we recognise staff throughout the country who make an exceptional contribution to Pathways and the people we support, and who clearly embody the values of Pathways.
Find out more about the Trish Glen Award and meet this year’s recipients here.