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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-09-27 Daily Xml
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Rural Psychiatric Services

Ms PRATT (Frome) (14:39): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Is the government increasing the psychiatry workforce in rural South Australia. With your leave, and that of the house, sir, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Ms PRATT: On page 50 of the review of rural mental health services, it concludes that, when it comes to the number of psychiatrists per capita, and I quote:

Internationally Adelaide is on par with countries such as France and Norway, while rural South Australia is worse off than Mongolia.

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:40): Certainly, the government is committed to increasing the psychiatry workforce right across South Australia and also in regional areas. The difficulty, of course, is obtaining, training and qualifying the workforce necessary. That is why, in fact, one of our election commitments was to undertake workforce planning in relation to the psychiatry workforce because we know that that is under pressure right across the state. We are working with The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists in relation to that workforce planning. That work is underway.

One of the inhibitors to training more psychiatrists in South Australia has been a bottleneck issue through child psychiatry because people have had to do rotations through child psychiatry and that area has been under such pressure that it has limited the ability of expanding training places for psychiatry. A double benefit of one of our investments that we are making in relation to expanding the child psychiatry workforce through the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service is that hopefully that will help to address one of those bottlenecks and enable more doctors to be trained in psychiatry as well, but certainly we welcome the report and its recommendations.

SA Health and the Chief Psychiatrist, Dr John Brayley, have already outlined a number of those areas that are being worked on already. There is much more work to do in terms of work with our local health networks in how we can work with psychiatrists to make sure we can attract them to regional locations across South Australia and ultimately improve people's access to care.

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