23 June 2022
An international mental health report has highlighted persistent workforce shortages as one of the major challenges preventing effective action in mental health programmes.
The new World Health Organization (WHO) World mental health report: transforming mental health for all (launched on 17 June 2022) states there are simply not enough health care professionals to meet demand across the continuum of care.
This includes prevention, promotion, treatment and rehabilitation of mental health and wellbeing.
The ANMF (SA Branch) has long agitated for workforce strategies to ease pressures on health care professionals, as well as for additional mental health resources, mental health staff and alternative places of treatment to reduce the strain on EDs which are ill-equipped to deal with the needs of mental health patients.
The International Council of Nurses (ICN), of which the ANMF is a member, is equally concerned about the mental health of nurses who have been facing mass trauma as a result of the pandemic, poor working conditions, staffing shortages, and other challenges.
As the WHO mental health report states, the human and community costs are immense:
- Undertreated – 71 per cent of people with psychosis do not receive mental health services
- Widespread - 1 in 8 people live with a mental health condition
- Under-resourced - Mental health care is severely under-resourced with less than two per cent of health budgets spent on mental health.
In addition to this, there are other consequences:
- Costly - The cumulative economic output loss associated with mental health is projected to be $16.3 trillion worldwide. The direct and indirect costs of mental ill health are estimated at over four per cent of GDP, which is more than the cost of cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory disease combined.
- Isolating – Stigma, discrimination and the poor legal protections isolate individuals from participating in communities.
- Life limiting - People with severe and persistent mental illness die 10-20 years earlier than the general population.
The ANMF (SA Branch) Action for Health campaign secured pre-election commitments from the newly elected State Government. This included a commitment to implementing workforce reform in the mental health sector and introducing funded staffing models to broaden access for people seeking mental health care.
The Government followed through with its commitment to funding in its recent budget with millions of dollars allocated to extra mental health beds, nurses and mental health community teams. The ANMF (SA Branch) will continue work with the Government on addressing workforce shortages, through current Public Sector 2022 Enterprise Agreement.
Recognising the workforce shortages in mental health services, ANMF (SA Branch) has also teamed up with Flinders University to make it easier for nurses to transition into post-graduate studies in mental health, among a range of other specialties.
This initiative provides nurses with more streamlined access to post-graduate studies at Flinders University by enabling them to springboard from a related Continuing Professional Development (CPD) course at our Australian Nursing and Midwifery Education Centre (ANMEC).
You can view our Health Policy Position Statement on mental health by clicking here and going to Pages 22/23.
Read WHO’s World mental health report: transforming mental health for all here.
To find out more about our mental health Continuing Professional Development Course you can click here.