Page 4148 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 15 November 2005
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support facilities in which appropriate services and care can be provided. The major issue that is raised by this MPI is the imperative to achieve a transfer of the provision of mental health services from those based in purpose-built facilities to community-based service delivery.
Running alongside of this is the fact that currently our health committee—Ms MacDonald is our chair, and Ms Porter and I are members of that committee—is looking into the appropriateness of housing for people in the ACT with a mental illness. It is a very timely MPI, I have to say, and a very timely topic that we do talk about and keep out there in the public arena. In our travels and on our investigations, it has been said by some commentators for the mental health sector that we, as a society, need to de-institutionalise the people and re-institutionalise the service.
As the Mental Health Council of Australia has also commented, the broad underpinning strategies for the transfer of mental health services to mainstream health services and community-based care were to build increased capacity in the work force, to deliver care within these altered service models, to build increased capacity in the community and non-government sector to provide care, and the empowerment of consumers and carers to participate in the planning, delivery and evaluation of care. The important outcome of this approach is to build these principles into the way in which these changed values and the mental health service provision are inculcated into service delivery. The good news is that there are examples emerging where these changed values appear to be leading to valuable changes in the ways that mental health services are being delivered.
Consider, for example, project 300 in Queensland. This project has shown how it is possible to achieve cross-sectoral cooperation between agencies and, by this cooperation, generate positive outcomes. Project 300 commenced in 1995 and has assisted some 200 people to move from long-stay psychiatric hospitals to community-based accommodation. This project has involved collaboration—that is a very key word there, isn’t it?—between Queensland Health, the Department of Families, Youth and Community Care, the Department of Public Works and the Department of Housing. The good news is that this project continues today, with annual recurrent funding of $9.2 million to support 190 people.
It is also instructive to consider the approach adopted by, for example, the New South Wales government, with a recently released policy on responding to people with a mental illness. The New South Wales government has implemented the housing and accommodation support initiative, known as HASI. This has demonstrated that well-planned, community-based programs meet the needs of people with severe mental illness. This project involves collaboration between the New South Wales departments of housing and health and three non-government organisations operating within New South Wales.
Early-stage evaluation of the outcomes from this program, undertaken by the social policy research centre at the University of New South Wales, shows that there have been significant improvements in the quality of life for the people involved in this project. Probably the most interesting result from this initial evaluation has been a dramatic decrease in the need for acute hospital services by the people involved in the project. The social policy research centre suggests that there has been a 90 per cent reduction in the number of days spent in hospital by HASI clients over a 12-month period. The research
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