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Parliamentary Questions


Question Without Notice No. 647 asked in the Legislative Assembly on 15 August 2019 by Mr Z.R.F. Kirkup

Parliament: 40 Session: 1

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.