We are grateful to Karen Lata from Mercy Health for sharing the details of her mini-project undertaken as part of our ‘Middle Leadership: empowering Middle Leaders’ Program in 2025.
A year of Mercy – Karen Lata, Merch Health
Hi I’m Karen Lata. I am proud to work with Mercy Health as a Regional Manager, overseeing the delivery of in-house aged and community services to people living in their own homes across my region. Our carers help people with maintaining their home, their personal care and grooming, medications, shopping, an outing, or sometimes just a much-needed cuppa and a chat.
We do this work across a large region in Victoria, spreading from Werribee, down through Geelong & the Bellarine, through to Colac and Warrnambool and across to Ballarat and surrounds.
My Mercy Ministries project is called A Year of Mercy.
Just prior to starting the Middle Leaders Program, I had seen a staff feedback survey that highlighted our care worker team did not feel well connected to the Mercy Mission and Vision. With hundreds of carers working for our team across four cities, most of whom rarely attend the office, this saddened me but did not surprise me. It struck me as an opportunity to take my learnings from the program and grow my team’s connection to Catherine McAuley and the spirituality that underpins Mercy’s work. To really connect these front-line carers to why we do what we do.
Getting this message to a geographically dispersed workforce was as challenge, but one that was made easier by the roll out of Microsoft 365 to the care workers mobile phones around this same time. This platform provided an easy way of getting my message to those who do not see emails and don’t speak to the office staff regularly.
I used the Newsletters function in MS Outlook to set up a monthly email that I could send to the Care workers, starting with Mercy Day on 24 September, 2025.
I have the bones of the newsletters in draft and it’s an easy task to clean these up and hit send once a month. A fantastic byproduct of this monthly newsletter is that it also keeps the Middle Leaders Program alive for me, keeps me reflecting on what I learned and ensures I remain focused on the ministry as well as the care we provide.
