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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2948 ..

going to be affected—and the measure. So, for example, for Health and Community Care, output 1.2 for mental health and supported accommodation services, on page 157, the measure of places with a target of 116 has been changed to a bed occupancy target of 95 per cent. For one thing, taking the occupancy target on face value, 95 per cent is a very high target. That is because in supported accommodation there is some necessary time between people.

Let us look at what these two measures tell us. The old measure of the number of beds was at least a quantity that could, with some additional research, be linked to the number of people who are accessing the service. But the occupancy rate is not at all useful. It gives no indication of whether even the number of places is increasing or decreasing, let alone any way to get to the more useful measures of quality. The sorts of things that we want to know about supported accommodation for people with mental health problems include: if, for example, there are 104 people for 104 beds, how many people could have moved on but were not able to find any accommodation—in other words, exit options? How many needed long-term support? How many got it? The same questions apply for short-term support. How many people came back? How many times? What were the genders, primary languages and ethnicity of people accessing the services?

The government may say that you need some focusing measures and outputs, and that is true to an extent, but it could do a lot better at linking the measures to the kinds of information that can really tell you how well the services provision is meeting needs, how much more is needed and of what type. It is also true that the number of outputs was drastically cut under the Carnell government, which was spun at the time as somehow providing more information, but clearly it did not.

Service providers do generally collect good data, but the analysis takes time and surely this is something where the government, interested in inclusion and so on, could do better. It is also a really fundamental part of any social plan that you have a deeper and better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of services and where there are groups in the community who are missing out, so that you can target services where they are needed.

Another example of a measure given under mental health services is:

Non-government organisations maintain Quality review against the National Mental Health Standards or Raising the Standards (Good Practise Standards for Community Service Organisations).

The target is 100 per cent. I have many questions about what is happening there. The 100 per cent target does not work.

Another measure is:

Community service providers implement and maintain agreed quality standards.

The target for the new measure for 2004-05 will be 100 per cent. It is obvious that we are not getting 100 per cent. I really would like to see the government take a serious look at how they can make these measures more meaningful and tell the story about what is happening on the ground. I know that this has been commented on in the Estimates

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