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Mental health plan
for public comment
A draft 10-Year Roadmap for National Mental Health Reform has been released for public consultation.
Federal Minister for Mental Health, Mark Butler said the Roadmap would provide Governments, the community sector, workplaces and communities themselves with a measurable, long term national reform plan for mental health.
Mr Butler said the plan would help guide where attention and funding was focused over the next 10 years and ensure the nation’s mental health system ranked as one of the world’s best.
“While we’ve taken great strides in how we view and treat mental illness, more needs to be done to provide a system that provides all the levels of care people living with mental illness need, available in the right place and at the right time,” he said.
| 10-year ‘Roadmap’ on table |
“We especially need to target our efforts at those who are hard-to-reach and vulnerable, and stop them from falling between the cracks and from being shunted from one service to another.”
He said more needed to be done to break down the stigma, discrimination and misunderstanding that surrounded mental illness.
“COAG agreed to develop the Roadmap in 2011 and the Australian Government, States and Territories have been working hard alongside mental health experts and consumer and carer representatives to develop this draft,” Mr Butler said.
“We want to get this Roadmap right and we want the community to be involved in the process which is why we are making it available for public comment.”
He said the public comments would be used to help finalise the Roadmap for COAG to consider in early 2012 and an online survey tool would be available until 1 February 2012 on the mental health page of the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing website at this PS News link.
Edition 201, 26 January 2012
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