Page 2037 - Week 07 - Thursday, 4 June 2015
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Chapter 13 improves the framework for the regulation of any private psychiatric facilities in the ACT, so that there can be adequate inspection of such facilities to ensure they are providing contemporary services that meet all relevant safety standards.
The bill also provides for clauses that clarify the current provisions and improve the safeguards on apprehension, transfer, and treatment, care and support of people who are under other Australian state and territory warrants or orders and of people from other states and territories who are in need of treatment, care and support in the ACT. Those clauses are in chapter 15.
These clauses ensure that, when appropriate, people under ACT mental health order can be expeditiously transferred to another state or territory to receive highly specialised services that may not be available here or to be near close friends and relatives or communities of support, such as an ethnic minority or Aboriginal community in which they were raised and to which they may still have close ties. It also allows people are under the mental health orders of another state or territory but who are in the ACT to be promptly transferred to their home jurisdictions to receive the therapeutic services ordered for them by that jurisdiction’s tribunal or court.
Chapter 40 provides transitional clauses to effect the continuation of people’s mental health orders made by the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal and other processes that have been initiated under the current act and which need to be continued after that act’s repeal by this bill.
Members will see that the content of these clauses in the bill is about clearer wording and safeguards on the processes for timely delivery of the right health and disability support options to a person with a mental illness or disorder. Members will also see that the bill’s clauses explicitly recognise that this timely delivery of the right supports is far more likely to occur if the legislation requires mental health and disability support professionals and the tribunal making mental health orders to consult meaningfully with the person and their carers about what they need and when, and to ensure the person can receive treatment when they urgently need it but are currently lacking the capacity to consent to it.
The bill is the outcome of a highly consultative public review of the ACT’s current Mental Health (Treatment and Care) Act, which was first enacted in 1994. Since then, the ACT and most other societies throughout the economically developed world have significantly advanced inclusion of their members who have mental illness or disorders. This has occurred as people with mental illness or disorders and carers across the world have increasingly influenced the disability rights movement, as well as community development, psychology, psychiatry, ethics and the law.
The current act had been amended in parts since it was enacted in 1994, but an extensive formal review of the act has afforded our community a comprehensive opportunity to look at it as a whole and decide how it should be reformed. This bill is an outcome of that review, as was the Mental Health (Treatment and Care) Amendment Act passed by this place late last year.
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