Mental Health Call-outs

Ms PRATT (Frome) (15:15): Mr Speaker, I thank you for your courtesy. My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. What, if any, additional resourcing has the government established in preparation for the scaling back of mental health call-outs by SAPOL? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Ms PRATT: It was reported in The Advertiser last week that police officers are currently undergoing training to help them assess which mental health jobs to attend and which to divert to other services to confidently redirect jobs to other agencies such as ambulance or other healthcare services.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (15:16): Specifically in terms of the question 'What investments are we making?' there is a huge number of investments in terms of mental health. We have dramatically increased funding to mental health over the course of the past 3½ years, and there is more investment coming. In particular, we are soon to see the first opening of what is going to be a series of additional mental health investments into our public hospital system, the first big increase in generations to the capacity of our mental health system.

The first of those will be The QEH mental health rehabilitation beds, and then there will be more to come at Flinders, Noarlunga, Modbury and Mount Gambier as well. But, of course, that is not all: we are investing significantly into community mental health services. One of the areas we are investing in is in relation to the work that we are doing together with SAPOL in terms of a mental health co-responder model. Where there is a call-out to SAPOL, a SAPOL officer, together with a mental health nurse, is able to respond to that call-out together and, in many cases, they are able to avoid SAPOL taking that person to an emergency department where they otherwise do not need to do so.

In relation to the other part of the question, which was specifically in relation to what The Advertiser article was about on the weekend, we do work closely with SAPOL. We are having discussions with SAPOL in relation to their consideration of further work that they are doing in relation to their call-outs. The Deputy Commissioner, Linda Williams, was on the radio earlier this week trying to explain, I think, the call-outs—by the different nature of some of the things that they are looking to reduce. I think the example she used was if there was somebody who was impounding a car and when they were going to impound that car they made a SAPOL call-out—that might be something that they would regard as something they didn't need to attend, but she went on to list other examples where they would be attending.

We will continue to work with SAPOL. We want to make sure that there is a good system and a good relationship in place between SAPOL, the Department for Health, local hospital networks, and also in particular the SA Ambulance Service to make sure that we can get this right, and we will keep working with SAPOL to make sure that it has a successful outcome.