Maurice
Maurice Vaillancourt is Secretary of The Shared Care Forum. He is also: Projects Manager and Strategy Adviser for Primhe, the charity devoted to mental health and wellbeing in primary care and communities; Chair of Rethink’s South East Regional Reference Group; Chair of Hampshire Partnership Trust’s Early Intervention in Psychosis Development Group; and an honorary member of the Royal College of General Practitioners Mental Health Group.
He is currently researching modernised, third-sector delivered, crisis management; sub-acute assessment; peer-supported accommodation; and policy-influencing techniques through social movement/enterprise and corporate social responsibility agendas.
Choice in mental health is important to him through his experiences with his son, as they were given no choices in the appalling treatment he received.
From a background in corporate organisational analysis and management psychology, he embarked upon an extracurricular career as a mental health policy and service-delivery redesign lobbyist following his son's psychosis in 2001, when aged sixteen.
He regularly addresses a variety of whole-population education initiatives, including schools-interventions, public awareness-raising events and conferences, and advises various media portals on the imperatives for change in adolescent mental health service-delivery and transition protocols. He is also an adviser and expert witness for the Age-Appropriate Amendment to the Mental Health Bill and involved with a number of national policy-making initiatives and CAMHS redesign evaluation panels.
