Page 2071 - Week 07 - Thursday, 20 August 2020
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this is balanced is respected by including a provision for a person to be removed from an affected person register. For the affected person, this balance is reflected by an extension of the right of appearance at ACAT and to access information, as well as bolstering the role of the Victims of Crime Commissioner in supporting affected people.
One significant way in which we are making our legislation more agile and responsive is through the introduction of a power of the Chief Psychiatrist to make guidelines for the act. Mrs Dunne made some remarks about this. This enables the Chief Psychiatrist to provide leadership and clarity for consumers, clinicians, carers and other members of the community who are interacting with this legislation. It recognises that the Chief Psychiatrist is appointed to bring their expertise as a psychiatrist to ensure that the real-life clinical and operational aspects of our system are functioning in accordance with the law made by this Assembly. The Chief Psychiatrist can use these guidelines to ensure that the principles and objects of the act are being embedded into the decisions that are being made every day in clinical and operational settings.
It is common in other jurisdictions for the Chief Psychiatrist to make guidelines as one of the levers available to provide leadership and direction in the mental health system in relation to the legislation. In practice, the Chief Psychiatrist is frequently asked for guidance on these matters by clinicians and others engaging with the act. These guidelines provide a mechanism for this guidance to be formalised through a notifiable instrument, which will be available on the legislation register for all in our community to see. Some jurisdictions allow the Chief Psychiatrist to make mandatory guidelines through policy alone. However, we have taken the step of making these guidelines notifiable instruments to ensure a higher standard of transparency. It ensures that mental health consumers and their carers can know what to expect from clinicians or others who are working with the act on a daily basis. Guidelines will be mandatory for all public and private mental health facilities in the ACT.
It is not uncommon for statutory officeholders to make guidelines in relation to the matters in their purview. For example, the Emergencies Act 2004 provides that the Emergency Services Commissioner may make guidelines for the strategic operation of the emergency services. These guidelines by the Emergency Services Commissioner are a notifiable instrument in the same way that the Chief Psychiatrist guidelines in this bill will be, continuing the commitment of the ACT government to be open and transparent about these sorts of provisions. As a notifiable instrument, the guideline becomes part of the legislation register, which can be viewed online alongside the information about when the guideline commences and any earlier renditions of the guidelines that applied in the past. In other jurisdictions the Chief Psychiatrist can make guideline standards and directives by mandatory policy. This was considered an undesirable pathway for the ACT and not consistent with the expectations of the Canberra community about how officeholders make decisions.
The guidelines provisions in this bill recognise the special role that police officers and ambulance paramedics have at the front line in our community. There will always be times when the first person that a mental health consumer engages with during an episode of mental ill health will be a police officer or a paramedic. It is critically important to acknowledge the overlap between the mental health system, the
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