Mental Health Services

The Hon. T.J. STEPHENS (15:10): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Will the minister update the council on mental health services in South Australia?

The Hon. S.G. WADE (Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (15:10): I thank the honourable member for his question. The Marshall Liberal government is working to improve support for mental health services. When we were elected, we even had a situation where the 10 PICU beds at the Royal Adelaide Hospital—in other words, the mental health beds for people with the most acute needs—had not been opened. That was seven months after the hospital itself opened.

We are continuing to build on the range of mental health services in South Australia and one key recent announcement was the government's commitment to an Urgent Mental Health Care Centre. We know that emergency departments with their activity and pressure do not provide the best environments to mental health patients in terms of their therapeutic and diagnostic needs. It is challenging for mental health patients, and the resultant stress within the ED often has flow-on impacts for other patients and staff.

The Urgent Mental Health Care Centre will provide a calmer and more suitable environment for people experiencing mental health challenges and aims to link people quickly to community mental health supports. The successful tenderer for the Urgent Mental Health Care Centre has now been announced.

The government will partner with Neami National, an Australian not-for-profit mental health provider, to deliver this new project. Neami National has been providing a range of mental health services under contractual arrangements with SA Health since 2005-06 and have a long history of working in mental health in the state. They will partner with RI International, a US not-for-profit organisation and an international leader, in promoting suicide prevention models in mental health, the delivery of mental health crisis care services and the use of peer workers in crisis care.

I welcome the support of the Mental Health Coalition of South Australia for this initiative and particularly the public comments of the coalition's chief executive officer, Geoff Harris. If I could quote a couple of paragraphs from a recent statement that he issued, which states:

This much needed centre is the first of its kind in Australia while similar models have been operating for a number of years in the United States.

It will provide a high quality alternative to the Emergency Department and has been developed based on strong feedback from the experiences of people with mental illness and their families as well as clinicians.

He goes on further in the statement to say:

'The lived experience of people living with mental illness has informed this model of mental health care and we are one step closer to providing them with the much needed mental health care they have been asking for for many years.'

The Urgent Mental Health Care Centre will improve outcomes for people experiencing mental distress or in mental health crises. It will reduce wait times for mental health patients who do not need to be in a hospital environment and it will divert them to a more suitable environment for them to receive their care.