Advocates push for changes to mental health funding
HALIFAX — Canada trails the pack when it comes to mental health funding levels among comparable industrially developed countries — but advocates say a promise from the federal government to improve services means the time is ripe to push for change.
“Access to care is abysmal in most places throughout the country and of course that’s linked ... not only, but very much to funding,” said Louise Bradley, executive director of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, in a recent interview.
“We’ve been told to do more with less for a very long time. I think the rubber band is stretched as far as it can go.”
Bradley’s organization and others, such as the Canadian Mental Health Association , have been calling for the mental health share of health spending in the provinces and territories to increase by two percentage points over the next decade — from a national average of seven per cent to nine.
Canada’s funding levels rank near the bottom among a list of OECD countries, a point of concern for the Trudeau Liberals, who have pledged to make improved access to services a priority since coming to power last fall.
Bradley says she’s cautiously optimistic something can be done through the upcoming round of discussions on a new health funding agreement between Ottawa and the provinces — but even that modest increase would leave Canada behind countries such as New Zealand, Australia and the U.K., where funding levels range from 10 to 14 per cent.
Most Canadian jurisdictions are proportionally in the same funding range or slightly higher than Nova Scotia, which earmarked $275 million out of its overall $4.1 billion health budget for mental health services for 2016-17.
Bradley said the numbers simply don’t meet the demands of a growing burden of care for the overall health system and for the economy at large in terms of lost productivity, at about $50 billion a year.
Steve Lurie, executive director of CMHA’s Toronto branch, said research has found that the mental health disease burden in Canada’s most populous province is 1.5 times that of cancer and heart disease and seven times that of infectious disease.
Yet Lurie said Ontario invested about $500 million over a 10-year period for mental health compared to $16 billion in other areas of health care.
“What this manifests as, is that people are denied the treatment they need,” said Lurie. “There are wait times to get everything from psychotherapy to assessments to get into supportive housing.”
Lurie said in recent years a number of provinces have funded initiatives that, if “scaled up appropriately,” would make a big difference.
He said Ontario has funded assertive community treatment teams, which are multidisciplinary teams that target people with complex mental illness.