As we come to the close of another year, I want to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve achieved together and to thank our staff, students and partners for your dedication and passion, and our families, for their trust in us. This year has been marked by growth, innovation, and resilience. We’ve continued to strengthen our commitment to families, communities, and the principles that guide our work—collaboration, curiosity, inclusion, and evidence-informed practice.
2025 has been a year of significant milestones for The Bouverie Centre:
Expanded Family Therapy Training: We delivered record numbers of professional development programs, equipping practitioners across Victoria and beyond with skills to support families in complex contexts.
Expanded Family Therapy Clinic: We met with and helped a record number of families this year, thanks to our new Rapid Access Family Therapy (RAFT) model.
Research Impact: Our research team published influential findings on family-focused mental health interventions, shaping policy and practice nationally.
Community Engagement: We deepened partnerships with Aboriginal communities and embedded culturally safe approaches in our programs.
Digital Transformation: We expanded online learning, making our training more accessible and flexible for practitioners everywhere, and have started to build our new Family e-hub - watch this space!
Bouverie Research: Publication Celebrations
We want to celebrate three papers published in recent months, each of which represents years of work. Our Strengthening Connections paper documents the development of our family therapy service offered for over four years in the Victorian women’s prisons. The paper will stand in time as a tribute to the integration of clinical practice and research, First Nations and mainstream lenses, to building something of enormous meaning and importance to incarcerated women and their families. The other two papers are part of the Ramsey Health Foundation series, which Felicity Painter and I contribute to. Here, we continue to build the evidence for why early life course support for families is so critical to future mental health.
Booth, A. T., Welsh, E. T., Jayasinghe, A., Elliott, A., Tsorlinis, K., Story, K., Lefebour, L., & McIntosh, J. E. (2025). Family-Centered Support for Women Prisoners to Reduce Recidivism Risk: The ‘Strengthening Connections’ Service. International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/0306624X251389984
Zhang, L., Liontos, D., Olsson, C. A., Evans-Whipp, T., McIntosh, J. E., Painter, F., Harverson, J., Whittle, S., & Australian Early Relational Health Network (2025). Early Relational Health and its Impact on the Developing Brain: A Scoping Review. Clinical child and family psychology review, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-025-00545-3
Painter, F., Harverson, J., King, G…. McIntosh, J. . Mapping the Influence of Infant–Parent Relational Quality on Life Course Relationships: A Scoping Review of Prospective Cohort Studies. Clin Child Fam Psychol Rev (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-025-00527-5
The holiday season is a time to pause, celebrate, and acknowledge the richness of our shared work. It’s also a time to honour the diversity within our team and the communities we serve. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, Eid, or simply the turning of the year, may this season bring you peace, joy, and renewal.
Looking ahead, 2026 promises new opportunities to innovate and strengthen our services. It’s also our 70th Birthday and we will be having a series of events for staff, students, alumni, families and industry partners, to celebrate.
Article by Professor Jenn McIntosh, Director, The Bouverie Centre, La Trobe University
