Stephen Rollnick – down under

Dr Stephen Rollnick with the Christchurch based HMA team who hosted this visit

We have been privileged over the past week to have Professor Stephen Rollnick visit New Zealand and run three workshops on motivational interviewing. The respect for Stephen’s work in developing MI along with Dr William Miller, was evidenced by the number of people who attended the three events. Overall we had 455 people attending at various sites. This tells me that within the human services in New Zealand there is significant interest in finding effective ways to engage people in change.

If the range of practice areas of the attendees is indicative of the reach of motivational interviewing, then we are well placed in developing these ideas further. Across the country we had the obvious addiction workers but a significant number from fields such as corrections, health, education, and disability. This spoke volumes about how and where MI is now being practiced.

A big thanks to Matua Raki for supporting this event and a big thanks to those who attended for making this visit so successful. We recognise that in the current climate training budgets are tight and that accessing high quality professional development opportunities is not always easy.

Dr Rollnick now heads to the 3^rd International Symposium on Motivational Interviewing (ISMI2013) which is being held over two days in Melbourne (13^th & 14^th May).

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