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Many Australians experience a mental illness at some time in their lives. Young people in particular, and others such as Indigenous people, the elderly and those living in rural areas are vulnerable to mental illness.

Several Federal Parliamentary Senate Inquiries have identified significant deficits in mental health funding and, along with the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, have pointed to the need for reform of mental health service delivery arrangements.

The current Government’s response has been inadequate. In particular, there continues to be problems with community-based mental health services. These have not been appropriately structured or funded since the Burdekin reforms that moved much of the care and treatment of people with a mental illness out of institutions and into the community. For people with serious mental illness living in the community, there is also a particular difficulty in accessing care by psychiatrists in community-based settings.

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All Australians with a mental illness deserve to have ready access to quality mental health care based on their particular needs. This includes early identification, community-based outpatient care, and inpatient acute care. For those with serious mental illness, the road to recovery can be long, and can require intensive care and further community-based specialist medical treatment, as well as social support such as supported accommodation.

People are still frequently unable to access the mental health care they need, when they need it. In particular, follow-up care in the community after hospitalisation for an acute episode is often lacking.

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Some opportunities for early identification and intervention for youth have been established. But there continues to be significant unmet need in mental health care and major gaps in service provision that the next Government must address as a matter of urgency.

This must include addressing the deficit of specialist community-based care. Currently, people with serious mental illness will often have to be admitted and re-admitted to the public hospital system at short notice, notwithstanding the shortage of acute care beds. This is not sustainable.

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Mental health must be included as a central component in the next Government’s health agenda. The next Government must:

• Provide greater investment for, and progress the reform of, comprehensive mental health services;
• Increase capital and recurrent funding for psychiatric beds based on an analysis of the number of new psychiatric acute and sub-acute care beds required in the public hospital system as part of the AMA’s proposed stocktake of public hospital bed capacity – Bedwatch;
• Provide greater support and funding for community-based clinical and support services for people living in the community who have mental illness. This should include:
  • improved access to care from specialist psychiatrists in community-based settings such as private specialist rooms and community-based mental health facilities; and
  • an increased number of community-based sub- acute outreach services for GPs to refer patients with a mental illness to, where appropriate.

* For a full pdf version of the Key Health Issues for the 2010 Federal Election click here