Mental Health Services

Ms PRATT (Frome) (14:55): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Does the government now believe that management of mental health is a matter for police? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Ms PRATT: On FIVEaa radio this morning, the police commissioner said, and I quote:

It is taking up a significant amount of police time dealing with mental health in the community and we do convey a lot of people to hospital and we spend a lot of time waiting for those people to be assessed so we can get back to our core function. So we are doing what we can to minimise the impact of mental health on police tasks, but it is a perennial problem.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:56): The short answer to the member's question is no, and I am not sure that there is any correlation between what she is asking and what the police commissioner said on radio this morning. I think the government, just in the past couple of weeks, has demonstrated that we know what we need to address in terms of supporting both our police and our hospitals, but also people in the community, in terms of the investment that we have made in the budget in the Mental Health Co-Responder model.

This is a model which we originally piloted a couple of years ago based in the NALHN region and have now extended to the CALHN region as a trial, but we will now be making this permanent and extending it to the southern Adelaide local health region as well, where our police and mental health clinicians respond jointly to many of these cases in the community, which has the benefit of making sure that we can improve the outcome for that person and their journey, in many cases—probably the majority of cases—avoiding the need to go either to an emergency department or into the criminal justice system. But this also means that there is less pressure on our hospitals and less pressure on our police and our criminal justice system as well.

So this has been a real win-win. That is why we are investing in it further and that is why we continue the collaboration that is happening between SA Health and our local health networks and South Australia Police. Clearly, there is always going to be a level of cases and call-outs that police will have to deal with where there's a threshold question in terms of whether it is a mental health issue or not, in terms of the police response to particular crimes or issues that are happening in our community. These sorts of models where we can work more closely together, delivering a better outcome for that person and the system overall, is a very key way in which we can address that, which I also think, if we had the full transcript of what the police commissioner said on radio, he went on to explain in some detail.