Page 1117 - Week 03 - Thursday, 21 March 2019
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
affect mental health, which include but are not limited to housing status, employment or interactions with the judicial system.
As a result, the large difference in the reported SEIFA data gives us reason to believe that the people in the ACT who are accessing public clinical mental health services would more commonly have more complex and severe mental illness than occurs nationally. In the context of this complexity, it is not surprising that the ACT would have a lower proportion of people reporting significant improvement in the HoNOS scale upon discharge from hospital.
However, this also does not mean that patients are not receiving the support that they need. Acute hospital settings are not always the most appropriate place to address a patients’ complex needs. Instead, the ACT has a significant focus on providing mental health care in the community to complement acute hospital services.
Community care helps to manage mental health in less restrictive environments and can prevent people with less severe mental illness from requiring inpatient admission. This balance between acute and community care can influence the make-up of the hospital population in the ACT, skewing it towards a more acute population.
As a demonstration of the ACT’s mental health community activity, the AIHW reports that in 2016-17 the ACT had a rate of 769.7 community mental health care service contacts per 1,000 people. This is the highest rate in the country and is more than double the national average of 365.2 community contacts per 1,000 people.
Also, since the release of the 2016-17 data, the ACT Government has made a strong commitment to improve the social and economic determinants that affect people’s mental health in the ACT, which will be able to help members of the population with complex mental health needs.
This commitment is primarily demonstrated through the Office for Mental Health and Wellbeing, which was established in June 2018. The Office has a key role in coordinating Whole of Government action and policy to address some of these ‘upstream’ determinants of mental health. This has already included the establishment of a Stewardship Agency Group to bring all of the ACT Government Directorates into the discussion and begin work towards this shared vision of mental health.
The establishment of the Office was based on the recognition that there are many elements of improving mental health that are outside the traditional purview of health services. However, coordinated work to address the social and economic determinants of mental health in the ACT will help to ensure that people who are more socially disadvantaged in our community will have better mental health outcomes, resulting in fewer hospital presentations and admissions.
Schools—bullying
Ms Berry (in reply to a supplementary question by Mr Parton on Wednesday, 13 February 2019):
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video