Page 4151 - Week 12 - Thursday, 1 December 2022
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prevention, intervention, postvention and aftercare for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Canberrans.
This service is now being established by Thirrili, an Aboriginal community-controlled organisation, working with Woden Community Service and our local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community, and will be designed and delivered by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This new service is supported by evidence analysed by the ACT Office for Mental Health and Wellbeing and recommendations from the ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention and Mental Health Working Group.
I was also pleased to speak in this place over the last two weeks about the success of the Stride Garran Step Up, Step Down mental health service, which opened in 2021 and provides residential therapeutic care to people aged 18 years and older. Of the five residential mental health Step Up, Step Down services in the ACT, three are suitable for people up to 25 years old.
There is the five-bed service in Watson for young people 13 to 17 years old, the six-bed service in Kambah for young people 18 to 25 years old, and the six-bed service in Garran for people 18 to 64 years old. These services empower people in the community to step up from community-based mental health programs when they need additional support or step down from a hospital inpatient stay as part of their transition home. I note that, with respect to one-third of participants in the Stride Garran service in 2021-22 who were stepping up from community care, of those 78 per cent said they would have presented at the emergency department if the Step Up, Step Down service had not been available.
Finding the right mental health supports is challenging at any age, but for young people there are additional barriers, in that this may be their first experience of having to navigate complex health and social services systems of any kind. The MindMap online service, which Mr Pettersson referred to earlier, launched in October 2021 and has provided information and resources for young people, their families and carers on a range of mental health conditions, where to get help and youth navigators available by webchat or phone to support young people in connecting to the right service for them. I have spoken about this service in this place several times over the last year.
The ACT government has increased investment in prevention and early intervention services and support to navigate mental health services, and we continue to progress increased access to acute care services as well. This has been possible because of the years of research, policy development and relationships built across directorates, clinical services and NGOs by the Office for Mental Health and Wellbeing.
In acknowledging the work of the Office for Mental Health and Wellbeing, I would also like to acknowledge the foresight of my colleague Minister Rattenbury, as the former Minister for Mental Health, in establishing the office. We can see now how important that decision was. The research and policy development crucially and consistently included the voices of people with lived experience, making sure that we have a deeper understanding of how the decisions we make about service funding will impact on people’s lives, and that includes young people with lived experience. There
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