Our mental health system continues to fail those with severe and complex mental health challenges, as election commitments from both major parties ignore the long-term structural change the sector urgently needs.
Mental Health Coordinating Council (MHCC) welcomes investment in additional Medicare Mental Health Centres, youth-focused services like headspace and training for peer workers. However, a truly effective response requires a systemic, coordinated approach —one that unites efforts across all states and territories to build a cohesive mental health system. This is essential to address the deep and growing gaps in care for people living with complex and enduring mental health challenges.
Long-term mental health and psychosocial services are central to supporting people in the community to stay well and maintain quality of life. These community-managed programs are key to minimising the need for inpatient admissions and providing cost effective wrap-around supports that evidence has shown to have lasting positive outcomes for both individuals and the community.
MHCC call on the major parties to focus on the absence of a systemic response to the unmet and growing mental health and psychosocial needs of the Australian community, including:
- A national framework for care coordination and safe service transitions across the system;
- Commonwealth and state and territory governments to work together to design and implement effective integration across the whole health and human service system, so people can access holistic supports;
- Co-designed systemic planning to include people with lived experience of mental health challenges and those that care and support them in a truly collaborative process;
- NDIS Foundational Supports to enable prevention and early intervention programs, minimising use of inpatient and other public community mental health services
- Expediting the National Mental Health Commission review and establishing the Commission as an independent statutory body with the authority to call government to account on service delivery commitments and targeted outcomes;
- Revising the National Mental Health Workforce Strategy to include the community-managed workforce with the appropriate investment to ensure capacity and sustainability.
MHCC urge the next Government to take this opportunity to address existing fragmentation of the mental health service system and look to the multitude of Commonwealth and state mental health reviews over the last 15 years that presents clear evidence for a different kind of service system, built around the lived experience of people with mental health challenges.
Government must refine the National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention bilateral agreement, and all Mental Health and Health Ministers must share their best evidence in creating a service system that is recovery-oriented, trauma informed, and codesigned with individuals with lived experience, ensuring the system is accessible and responsive to people's needs at all points in their lives.
Dr Evelyne Tadros says, "Only a concerted effort to design a cohesive well-constructed system rather than maintain a patchwork of services attempting to fill some gaps whilst leaving others completed overlooked, will serve the people of NSW and Australia, and create the world class mental health system we need".
