Page 774 - Week 03 - Thursday, 2 April 2020
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governments can support that through various tax relief measures. I need to be frank with everyone: not every business is going to survive this. There is no level of government support—territory or federal—that can save every single business through this once in a century economic and health crisis. We need to be honest with people about that. But whatever we possibly can do, within reason, we will do.
Mental health––COVID-19
MR WALL: My question is to the Minister for Mental Health. Minister, I note previous discussions between Mrs Dunne and you, and the fact that mental health facilities and services in the ACT have been operating at or near capacity for a considerable period. Minister, what advice have you taken as to the need for increased mental health services during the COVID-19 pandemic?
MR RATTENBURY: I thank Mr Wall for the question. Firstly, I am pleased to be able to let Mr Wall know that, through the measures that have been put in place in recent times, the average operating capacity for the adult mental health unit for this year has been around 85 or 86 per cent, contrasting to the near 100 per cent operating capacity that it was at this time last year. So there has been improvement there. That has given us some margin, but clearly the COVID situation has the real potential to drive increased demand for mental health support services.
But it will not all necessarily be at the inpatient level. Right across the community, mental health and wellbeing are likely to be impacted. Some of that will be a lot of people who are at home who are experiencing a range of anxiety situations. In particular the amount of uncertainty that we are facing here leads to a natural sense of anxiety for many people. So a lot of the work that needs to be done, I think, is at a community wellbeing level and trying to provide some of that low-level support for a lot of people who are finding themselves in circumstances they are not used to.
In our inpatient facilities, there is a range of contingency planning being done in terms of how, if somebody is identified as being COVID positive, that will be managed within a unit; thinking about staff levels, as many other units are having to do, to make sure that we do not lose all of our staff to illness; and measures in that vein. So there is a lot of contingency planning going on at the moment.
MR WALL: Minister, what preparations has the government made for an increase in demand for mental health services both during and following the COVID-19 pandemic?
MR RATTENBURY: As I said, there has been a range of thinking going on. One of the immediate responses is that, as members will have seen, in the first ACT government economic support package one of the first measures we took was to provide additional funding of $100,000 to Lifeline to enable them to increase the number of calls that they receive. They have been able to do that in recent times. Data I saw this week from the CEO of Lifeline suggested that they have been able to take about an additional 850 calls and they have increased their call-taking rate quite a lot in terms of the percentage of calls answered. That has been an immediate measure.
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