industry & policy
“ We are calling on him to take it to Cabinet , where the government must agree to reverse this historical anomaly so that nursing home residents have the same access to mental health services as everyone else .”
Yates sits down with Aged Care Insite to discuss the campaign and the potential boon he hopes it will achieve for mental health services in aged-care settings .
ACI : Where does this policy decision stem from , and why do you believe aged-care residents weren ’ t included in the program when it was first established ? IY : The program , which was launched in 2006 , so planned for some time even before that , was a major initiative to give people in the community better access to mental health services through their GPs by paying the GPs for the process of consulting with their clients , their patients , and then referring them to psychologists and psychiatrists .
At the time , all institutions were excluded from it , and at that time , that ’ s what residential aged care was seen as . So I think that it comes from a different era .
The same provision was left there in 2011 when the Gillard government reviewed the program and changed many aspects of it , but now we think it ’ s time that that is reversed .
Why is it important to overturn this decision ? It ’ s important for several reasons . One is that the assumption back in 2006 , which has been brought out in recent commentary , is that the nursing home is responsible for ensuring that people who need access to mental health services get it .
We think that that ’ s not delivering the quality of mental health service access that nursing home residents deserve , and it ’ s not delivering the same quality that someone who is , for example , in high level home care [ and who ] can go to their GP and get access . Yet , someone in basically the same situation , perhaps even a spouse , a partner in a residential setting around the corner , can ’ t get that access .
So we think that the time for saying that you have a different level of access to an essential health service just because you ’ re in residential aged care is passed .
Also , we [ have a ] reform process in aged care which , in terms of the roadmap … [ has us ] moving to a situation where people get an allocation of resources which , to use the road map ’ s terms , is agnostic as to where it takes place .
In that kind of a much more consumer-controlled environment , the notion that the consumer wouldn ’ t have control over getting the access to mental health services they need through their GP is anachronistic .
COTA launched a petition calling for this policy to be changed . What response are you hoping to generate ? That petition calls on Minister Hunt , who of course has just arrived in the health portfolio , and indeed we will be using it with Minister [ Ken ] Wyatt as well , who ’ s responsible for aged care . We ’ re calling on them to go to Cabinet and say that this decision , whether or not it made sense back then , doesn ’ t make sense in 2017 , and that we need to fix it .
Now , obviously fixing an issue like this is not something that just one minister can do . It ’ s going to have to go into the Budget process , it ’ ll have to go through Cabinet ’ s Expenditure Review Committee , the Department of Finance will be making estimates on what it thinks it will cost , and government expenditure constraints are very tight at the moment .
But we think that the government needs to recognise the principle of this , and then work to implement it rapidly .
So it ’ ll have to go to Cabinet , and we think that having a petition with many , many thousands of Australians backing these rights will strengthen the arm of Ministers Wyatt and Hunt when they go to Cabinet .
How else can people get involved in the campaign ? At the moment what we really want people to do is sign up to the petition . Once they ’ ve done that , we will then judge what kind of traction we ’ re getting from the ministers , and if we need to , we will then approach the people who signed the petition through their email address and ask them , for example ... [ to send letters ] directly , not only to the ministers , but to members of Cabinet .
In these campaigns , you ’ ve got to judge it step by step . The key thing that people can do , apart from signing the petition themselves , is to send the link to their friends , to their work colleagues , to their families and their networks , whatever they are , and encourage other people , put it on their Facebook posts , encourage other people to sign it .
Spread the word so that we build a strong constituency of support for this important change . ■
View the petition at www . healthforolderaustralians . org . au
agedcareinsite . com . au 11