Page 2924 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 12 October 2022
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team, as well as an evaluation—an important element of any trial process. This funding, at $1.997 million, expands PACER to two teams, seven days a week, serving the whole of Canberra.
The success shown by the Way Back program, delivered by Woden Community Service, has also resulted in the investment of $3.533 million over four years to expand the program to support more people. Way Back provides prevention support for people experiencing suicidal ideation and distress, as well as aftercare. There is also funding in this initiative to further enhance the postvention support offered through coronial counselling delivered by Relationships Australia.
We want to reduce the number of people presenting to hospital with mental health by increasing the accessibility of appropriate mental health supports in the community. That is why this budget includes $9.384 million over four years for services that reduce people’s need for presentations to hospital, such as ongoing funding for the home assessment acute response team—HAART—including a specific Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander position, ongoing support for the homeless outreach team after the success of their recent 12-month pilot program, and a new adult dialectical behaviour therapy program.
Dialectical behaviour therapy is a skills-based approach, alongside both physical and meditative exercises, specifically addressing self-image, impulsive behaviours, mood instability and poor relationships. To address these areas, DBT tries to build behavioural skill in mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation and interpersonal effectiveness. It is proven to be effective in treating borderline personality disorder and complex PTSD, suicidality and self-harm behaviours.
Support for expanded access to dialectical behaviour therapy is also included in this year’s budget initiative, totalling $14.462 million over four years, to strengthen mental health support for families and young children, with the establishment of a mother-infant DBT program. This initiative also includes universal perinatal mental health screening and data collection—something I have discussed in this place previously, as part of the bilateral agreement with the commonwealth government on mental health and suicide prevention, which was signed in late March this year, establishing a multidisciplinary early intervention service to address young people at risk of developing mental health concerns, as part of that bilateral agreement, and expansion of the childhood early intervention team to Gungahlin Child and Family Centre.
I would particularly like to thank the Office for Mental Health and Wellbeing and ACT Health for their work to ensure that what was delivered in that bilateral was driven by the years of ACT research and advocacy of Canberrans with lived experience, rather than just repeating the same investments made by other jurisdictions without understanding the specifics of the ACT mental health sector, including our hardworking NGO sector.
Continuing our efforts to increase services addressing youth mental health, this budget also includes $8.1 million over four years for a youth-at-risk trauma service, based on years of detailed research and analysis by the Office for Mental Health and Wellbeing. The 2020 Review of children and young people in the ACT, the children and young
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