Before the election Labour said there was a crisis in mental health care.
Once in Government they set up a working group to find out if there was a crisis
400 meetings across New Zealand, 5,000 submissions and a year later the working group handed a 200 page report to the Government, who said it would take a few months to respond.
Now 9 working groups have been set up to respond to the 9 ‘themes’ of the first working group.
RNZ: Mental health working group replacement criticised
Robyn Shearer, deputy director general of mental health and addiction, said the Mental Health and Addiction Health Sector Leadership Group (HSLG) was put on hold following criticism of its make-up.
“As the ministry has adopted the hub and spoke model, the group will cease in its role.”
The hub and spoke model – which has one central hub, co-ordinated by the Ministry of Health, and nine “spokes” based on key inquiry recommendations – was first proposed in a 14 December email.
The structure was to be co-ordinated by a small co-ordination group, covering lived experience, family-whānau, Māori, Pasifika, NGOs, primary health organisations, and a DHB representative.
“This structure would also include nine working groups, dedicated to responding to each of the Inquiry report’s themes,” acting deputy director general of mental health and addiction Maree Roberts in a December said in an email to stakeholders.
The groups would “be responsible not only for feeding into advice to government, but for providing leadership and advice on implementation of changes and improvements across the health and social system”.
The email reminded readers that the government would formally respond to the inquiry in March 2019 and that the Ministry of Health was working to provide advice.
Ms Shearer, who has recently joined the Ministry of Health, said the leadership group was initially created to help the Ministry interact with key stakeholders.
“It was never intended to be the ministry’s main mechanism for feedback following the Inquiry’s report.
“The group’s primary role in this time was to assist the ministry in planning its engagement approach following the inquiry’s release.”
However, the December email from Ms Roberts outlining the group’s approach showed the it had a significant role in gathering feedback.
The first phase was to seek feedback and inform government.
The email suggested hosting small workshops with the public.
This sounds like repeating the same thing again, albeit fragmented into different groups.
Not surprisingly there have been eyebrows raised.
Mental Health Foundation chief executive Shaun Robinson raised concerns.
“Part of our feedback was you have to be really clear what it is you’re asking people, otherwise this could look like the inquiry is just carrying on. When do we stop talking and start doing?
“I kind of thought, ‘Well, you know, I did tell you!’ So it didn’t surprise me at all when they said they were going back to the drawing board.”
It did not adequately represent Māori and people who lived with mental health, he said.
Mr Robinson said the ministry made a few mistakes in the first steps because they “literally did not have the people”.
There was also confusion among those in the mental health sector about why the government needed to seek more answers when that was the whole purpose of the inquiry.
“But there are some pretty significant and far-reaching changes suggested in the inquiry report. If you want to really make those happen, you have to be quite careful.”
one thing the need to be careful about is spending too much time and money working in groups and inquiring,