Nats attack lateness of health reports

An annual monitoring report on mental health services is two years behind its normal schedule, with no report on the Labour Government’s time in office yet delivered.

National Party mental health spokesman Matt Doocey said this was because the Government didn’t want to show targets that it wasn’t meeting.

But the Ministry of Health says the reports are late because of a shift to more regular monitoring, and Covid-19.

The report shows how many people access mental health and addiction services across the country, and provides data on wait times, use of seclusion rooms, and other indicators.

The Office of the Director of Mental Health and Addiction Services has released these annual reports since 2005, usually with a year or less lag time – until the Labour-led Government was elected in 2017, promising serious action on mental health.

Despite that promise, only a single report has been released since the election – the report for the 2017 year, which was made public in early 2019. The reports for 2018 and 2019 remain unreleased.

A spokesperson for the ministry said the lateness was due to a variety of factors, including Covid19 and the establishment of a Mental Health and Addiction Directorate.

Covid-19 did not become an issue until early last year, however, when the report for 2018 would have already been released under the usual schedule for the previous decade.

Doocey said the public deserved to know if the Government’s new investment in mental health was working. ‘‘They don’t want targets because they don’t want to be held to account for not meeting them,’’ he said.

‘‘It’s hugely concerning, because these reports are a way of benchmarking the investment put into mental health, and the results of those investments.’’

He pointed to a target from the Government’s 2018 Mental Health and Addictions Inquiry to increase access to mental health services to up to 20 per cent of the population, from about 3 per cent in 2017.

The ministry spokesperson said some of the information was now being provided in other ways, but said the annual reports for 2018 and 2019 would still be released by March.

‘‘We are also placing a significant amount of this information online, so that in future it is easier to provide more regular updates rather than only releasing information once a year.

‘‘However, implementing these changes has taken longer than anticipated.’’