Mental health targets must be backed up, advocate says

Ambitious mental health targets are good, an advocate says, but she is concerned the sector does not have enough resources.

In an announcement on Thursday about a new $10 million mental health fund, Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey announced a set of five new targets to be folded into the government's 2030 goals.

Four of the five targets focus on decreasing the time spent waiting to access mental health support or be refereed to a specialist.

The government wants 80 percent of people accessing specialist mental health and addiction services to be seen within three weeks, and for 95 percent of people who go to the emergency department with mental health or addiction problems to be admitted, discharged or transferred within six hours.

"I firmly believe by setting ambitious targets, we will provide the focus needed to make progress," Doocey said.

One of the targets aims to increase training for the mental health and addiction workforce, with a goal of 500 professionals trained each year. That was an increase of 72, up from the 428 professionals already trained each year, Doocey said.

Training will come from baseline workforce development funding, which is already in use.

"In my view, one of the biggest barriers to support is our increasing workforce vacancy rates," Doocey said.

"I visited an adolescent community mental health service recently that had a 50 percent workforce vacancy rate. It's no surprise that people are stuck on waiting lists and waiting to be seen because of workforce vacancy rates."

He said the target was off the back of the auditor-general's call for a specific mental health workforce plan.

"It beggars belief we haven't had a plan over the last few years, and I'm committed to delivering that workforce plan very soon."

Jazz Thornton, who co-founded Voices of Hope, a non-profit group working in mental health, questioned whether it would be possible for the targets to be achieved considering staffing capacity.

"I am obviously questioning the fact that, for example, wanting to cut down wait times from six months to three weeks, but then increasing the number of people they are training by 80 - I don't really see how that's going to correlate. It's going to be interesting to see if the targets can come through."

A three-week wait time would be an improvement on the current six-month wait, but people would still be at risk while waiting, she said.

"Three weeks is absolutely not a short enough wait time. The people that I've been dealing with, you've had people that are acutely suicidal but maybe haven't attempted yet, and because they haven't attempted or said, 'I'm gonna do it now', they get put on that wait list, and that's not okay.

"We'll take the wins, I think any step in the positive direction is what we want, but also just being realistic about if your gonna put these targets out, you've gotta be able to hit them, because people are going to have these expectations to be able to see [a specialist]."

The fund would help mental health organisations do more, but the money would go quickly, Thornton said.

"I think almost everyone in the room who is from those different organisations will be looking to apply for it. I know so many organisations that are struggling with funding at the moment."

Doocey said the fund would help drive innovation from the organisations already working on the frontlines.

The government will match funding for non-governmental, community organisations, to a limit of $1m per year, per initiative.

Successful applicants will have to demonstrate they can deliver positive social return on investment, by increasing access to mental health and addiction support and developing capacity in the workforce.

Applications for the Mental Health and Addiction Community Sector Innovation fund, which was among new health spending in the Budget, will open later this month.

The government has already announced $24m over four years for Gumboot Friday to provide free mental health counselling services to young people aged between 5 and 25.

Workforce growth plans and ED wait times

Before the Budget, the government promised 13 more psychiatry registrars, which was not fulfilled on Budget Day.

Doocey told Checkpoint he had a plan to grow the workforce but did not detail if roles would be funded specifically.

"I've listened to the ideas, I've listened to the people behind them, and this fund is to support them, to be able to scale up their ideas and to support the publicly funded mental health system to reduce some demand by that being picked up within the NGO and community sector," he said.

The New Zealand College of Psychiatrists said the workforce had not grown enough to cope with the demand, especially for patients with more complex needs.

In response, Doocey said he was planning to release a plan on growing the mental health and addiction workforce.

"But we do need to grow all the mental health professions, whether that be psychiatry, nursing, psychology, and of course, the big workforce that is under-utilised in New Zealand is the peer support and lived experience workforce and we'll look to grow that as well."

Another target in the plan was for people seeking mental healthcare to spend no more than six hours in Emergency Department.

Doocey did not believe this would put pressure on hospital staff to send people back into the community before they were well enough.

"It prioritises people to be assessed earlier, to be given a pathway to either treatment or support and a mental health context," he said.

He said he had just been visiting Middlemore hospital.

"They'll be looking about how they triage people coming of mental health crisis concerns earlier and putting them into the support they need, whether that be inpatient facilities or looking at connecting them with community provision.

"The research shows that actually lives are saved when people are triaged, assessed and get the treatment that they need within that time frame, and that's what this National government has committed to."