MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES
647. Mr Z.R.F. KIRKUP to the Minister for Mental Health:
I
refer to the Auditor General's report released yesterday on mental
health services in Western Australia. Why, after two and a half years in
government, has the minister failed to move more mental health services from
high-cost hospital beds to lower-cost
community-based service delivery?
Mr R.H.
COOK replied:
I
thank the member for the question. Yesterday, the Office of the Auditor General
handed down a report into mental health services and how we are tracking
against the ''Western Australian Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drug
Services Plan 2015–2025''. This plan was put in place by the
previous government and sets a pathway for WA to reconfigure its mental health
services to put a greater emphasis upon prevention and subacute services. This
configuration was called for essentially by Professor Bryant Stokes in his 2012
report. It is a mission that mental health services around the world are on.
The Office of the Auditor General did not make any observations that everyone
was not already aware of. However, we welcome the report and we welcome the
Auditor General participating in this community conversation about how we
continue to put the emphasis on subacute and preventive mental health care, so
that people can either be prevented from slipping into a mental health crisis
or get assistance much earlier in their mental health episodes.
The
fact is that we continue to be struck by a significant growth in demand for
mental health services right across the continuum. Although we would like to be winding back services from acute
care, we still need to put resources into acute care to meet the needs of those
patients, and we are. In this year's budget, we will invest more than
$940 million in mental health, alcohol and other drug services. This is a record
investment in these services—the highest yet. This is expected to grow
to over $1 billion by 2022–23. However, we understand more needs to be
done. Everyone gets that. This is what mental health services around the
world are struggling with. The Mental Health Commission is doing a great job of
understanding the needs and what we need to do to grow community mental health
services. We will continue to push a move forward in that process.
The
mental health plan is just that: it is a plan about what we would do if we had
significant resources. We are talking about doubling the amount of
resources. However, even if we had those resources, we do not have the capacity
yet, and we will continue to grow that capacity. One of the important aspects
of that is the decommissioning of Graylands Hospital. We should be able to
relocate a third of the patients out of that ageing and acute care
institutionalised setting into community mental health services, but that is a long-term
piece of work, to which the commission is committed. We will continue to make
sure that we move in the direction of the plan.