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Gillard can fix shattered mental health services

25th Jun 2010

Professor Patrick McGorry all articles by this author

2 comments

PRIME Minister Julia Gillard starts her new job faced with many challenges, but also with many opportunities. One of those opportunities is a unique set of circumstances that can enable profound change in mental health.

On Friday 18 June, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd explicitly stated that mental health and aged care were the two next priority actions in healthcare. Less than a week later, at the exact time he was due to meet with the mental health sector to discuss ways of achieving progress in mental health, he was voted out of office.

But although mental health’s face time with the PM was gazumped by the ALP leadership battle, there is still momentum gathering for action on mental health reform.

Firstly, it helps that Julia Gillard is one of the politicians who “gets it” about mental health – something I observed first hand on her visits to the Orygen youth mental health service for which I work. But more importantly there are now political dynamics in play that are enablers of meaningful reform in mental health. Those enabling dynamics are greater sectoral unity, increased community support and “cut-through” to the national debate.

On the day that Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd, leaders of the mental health sector presented the Government she will now lead with an agreed, common position. More than 60 signatories – virtually every key mental health body, including representatives of doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health nurses and social workers – made it clear to Government as to what needs to happen next.

Julia Gillard’s Government now has an unprecedented opportunity to work with a unified sector and can seize this opportunity by orienting policy around ending unequal access to quality care between mental and physical health.

Also on the same day that Julia Gillard was voted in to become Australia’s first female Prime Minister, her office was presented with a petition from 80,000 Australians asking her to take urgent action on mental health. These signatories were mobilised in just 48 hours and are an early expression of growing community awareness and concern about mental health.

GetUp!, which organised the petition, also published an Auspoll last month showing 83% of Australians would support a $500m p.a. package of investment to begin implementing the 12 mental health recommendations of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission.

Such an investment could be made immediately as a confidence-building measure by Government before working to develop the national reform program in mental health that is one of the core recommendations of the sector to Government.

That wider package of reform will involve a lot more money – probably a doubling of mental health’s share of the health budget (now 6%) to bring it close to or equal to its share of the health burden (13 per cent). This involves several billion dollars a year of public money and can only be accomplished with public support.

However, the national conversation on mental health as reflected in recent media coverage reflects a growing understanding that services are severely underfunded, that this is discriminatory and detrimental to Australian families and that sustained action to address these failings is needed.
Whisper it softly, but we may be close to a tipping point on mental health reform.

Comments:

Shikha

25th Jun 2010
5:49pm

The stumbling block, rate limiting step and bottle-neck to any such health reforms would certainly be the health minister, overlooked in this article. It was this very government and this cabinet and Madam Roxon's department that have deemed only qualified psychologists dish out mental health care under the Mental Health Plan guidelines. They have undermined and side-lined other workers in this area already carrying a large burden and caring for a great many patients, risking fragmentation of care and more burden on the already over-stretched system. Rearranging the proverbial deck chairs won't save this sinking ship under this governance. When the Minister won't listen to legitimate arguments about the flaws in the direction of health reform what difference does it make who's at the top and who she reports to? Nurse prescribing, nurse practitioners setting up next to GP's, midwife indemnity fiasco, superclinics, diabetes budget-holding and so on. Damage already done.

sickofpoliticians

5th Jul 2010
1:40pm

Its just such a pity that it takes a change in Prime Minister to forge us toward a so-called 'tipping point'. Realistically, whoever is in government, the system will still stink until someone with some sort of experience of the mental health system, reforms it. The first question we need to answer is 'How can the mental health system sustain itself when the need clearly outweighs what is given?'.

My name was one of the 80,000 handed to parliament. I did so because I have seen the system at work, I have experienced the frustration, the never-ending cycle because patients are over medicated and dependent. I have experienced the heart ache of carers who struggle to get their person a diagnosis, just so they will be eligible for the hundreds of badly planned out "programs" that the goverment has presented us with.

Spend some money on therapy, spend some money on more staff and start paying the people that work the hardest the money they need to be able to sustain the jobs they face on a daily basis. Spend some more money on research, and put Australia in the running to be best practice for mental health. Spend money to ensure that those who are caring for someone living with a mental illness feels supported. Spend some money to ensure that the person living with the illness can obtain a diagnosis quickly, and without mistake. Train the clinicians, careworkers and stop spening money without doing your research - if you have a spare $1.1 billion dollars lying around somehwere, before you spend the money, ask youself... Where do people need to money the most?

We are a nation of over-weight people already, lets not add increased rates of mental illness to that as well. Stop spending money on opening up Australia to other nations, fix the situation we have here, first! People are taking their own lives everyday, and we are all sitting here arguing about what to do next. Get is right Julia, get it done!