Crisis services will get more than a quarter of a $100m spend on mental health in this year's Budget, Minister of Health Andrew Little has announced.
Andrew Little Photo: STUFF / Robert Kitchin
Little said community-based mental health crisis services would get $27.45m over four years from Budget 2022.
It would go to seven or eight services delivering things like residential and home-based crisis respite, community crisis teams, co-response teams, and peer-led services.
Building capacity and workforces would take time, so a small amount of funding in the first year would lay the groundwork for gradual increases in future, he said.
"The emphasis of the funding is going on community spaces, so community places, residential places that support people who have been acutely unwell but don't need to remain in a mental health board and can recover in the community."
Specialist child and adolescent mental health and addiction services would also get $18.7m and a further $10m would be spent on developing the sector's workforce.
"This is funding in place [that] now means that Health NZ and the Māori Health Authority can get on and negotiate arrangements and get that investment in the workforce going" - Andrew Little
Little said the extra funding in this area would allow hospitals to take on more specialists and some of the funding would go towards investing in workplace development.
The more than $43m remaining in the Budget's mental health spend will be announced on Budget Day.
The government-commissioned He Oranga report had found the first step needed would be ensuring better access to make it easier for people to get help earlier and closer to home, which prompted the Access and Choice programme and similar initiatives, but this next step would see improvements for people with the highest needs, Little said.
"People with severe mental health and addiction issues and their families have been patient through inaction by previous governments. They know building reliable services takes time. Now, three years into the plan to build a whole new mental health system, New Zealand is finally getting closer to a system we can be proud of."
Sustained effort and investment would be needed to fully address the pressures on specialist mental health and addiction services, he said.
Little today also announced a further $90m from the Budget would be spent on the promised rollout of the Mana Ake in-school mental health programme to five more regions.