Staffing hits mental health goals

Targets missed: 800 workers needed

Ahalf-billion-dollar programme to deliver better community and primary mental health care is failing to reach tens of thousands of people. The Government spent more than $600 million on the Access and Choice mental health programme in its 2019 Wellbeing Budget, but a new report showed workforce shortages were impacting on the programme’s ability to reach its targets.

Te Hiringa Mahara/The Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission has just released its latest stocktake of the programme which showed that despite considerable progress in the year to June, fewer people than hoped had got help.

Some 114,000 people were seen in the year ended June, around 36,000 people short of the target.

The report identified a lack of staff as one of the main problems, with almost 800 fulltime workers needed in two years’ time.

Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission chairperson Hayden Wano said the shortages, coupled with an increase in demand for services, were proving challenging.

He said an uptick in the number of young people experiencing mental health distress echoed what was seen around the world.

Despite the increased demand, it was last week reported that the number of acute beds for mental health patients had not increased since 2017.

But Wano said adding additional acute beds without doing anything else would “just be delaying the challenge that we face”.

He said patients in acute facilities often ended up there because of a lack of alternative options and he believed that “in the medium-term” there would be some benefit from the programme with regard to the pressure on acute beds.

“We are a watchdog . . . we know there’s some good examples of alternatives to acute beds that exist around the country — small in number, we need more of those.”

The need to build “a new kind of capability “in kaupapa Māori, Pacific and youth workstreams had presented an additional challenge in meeting the programme’s targets, Wano said.

“These areas are moving slower but we’ve seen some excellent progress in the kaupapa Māori space . . . in the last year.”

Access and Choice was not a shortterm programme, he said. “In the longer-term we have to have a longterm plan and it’s going to require sustained leadership.” — RNZ

A dog was returned to its home after several days stuck at the bottom of a cliff thanks to the efforts of Hawke’s Bay firefighters and their specialised drone team.

The owners of farm dog Kia contacted Fire and Emergency New Zealand for assistance on Tuesday afternoon after she had gone missing and it was suspected she had fallen about 40 metres down a cliff and into a ravine on their Maraekakaho property.

FENZ Hawke’s Bay acting district manager Glen Varcoe said the owners told FENZ they believed Kia had been stuck down there for about three or four days. “They went down and had a look themselves, not down the cliff, but they couldn’t find the dog, couldn’t hear it, so they contacted us to see if we were able to provide some assistance,” Varcoe said.

“The morning of their call, they could hear the dog and they believed it had fallen under a tree on a ledge.”

He said they sent an available rescue team from Hastings along with their drones, which helped to locate the dog and a clear path to get her out of trouble before the crew went down to retrieve her.

He said it didn’t take long to rescue Kia, since they had a good idea of where she was, and she was happily reunited with her family in relatively good condition.