Senior officials responsible for overhauling the mental health system have told the Herald they’re committed to building a comprehensive national crisis-response service after growing concerns about the lack of support for people in acute psychological distress.
The officials responsible for overseeing mental health in the restructured health system are: Philip Grady from Te Whatu Ora, Aroha Metcalf from Te Aka Whai Ora, the Māori health authority, and Dr Arran Culver, acting deputy director-general at the Ministry of Health.
The fact is that there are many New Zealanders that are feeling increasingly stressed out due to the effects from the current government’s policies and the bureaucrats who seem to be constantly making changes to interpretations of those policies.
Many of the changes have come about due to the failures of the original implementation of policies and a lot of these failures are directly related to the bureaucrat’s lack of experience in the public sector. It is a regular occurrence that we see bureaucrats making decisions on implementation of policies which in fact the average New Zealand citizens are totally opposed to as they believe that the policies are not fit for purpose.
In Budget 2019 the Government announced $1.9b for mental health, with $235 million set aside for building mental health and addiction facilities, yet in June 2020 the National Party mental health spokesperson revealed just $500,000 of $235m set aside for new mental health facilities in Budget 2019 had been spent, or 0.2 per cent.
Acute mental health units regularly operated at full capacity, when 85 per cent was considered the maximum safe level, and the lack of spending had seen just five extra acute mental health beds been added, with patients forced to sleep on mattresses on the floor because there were no mental health beds left.
In the Mental Health Service and Addiction Service Monitoring Report 2022 in the introduction it states that the Government has made a promising start with the cross-agency $1.9 billion package for mental wellbeing in the 2019 Wellbeing Budget. We commend this investment, particularly the addition of much needed primary and community services, but more is needed to address the pressure on specialist services.
We have seen little change in wait times and specialist services continue to feel pressured in meeting the volume of need and in recruiting and retaining the workforce required for current models of care.
When we take into account the volume and pace of legislative change that has occurred since the current government was elected at the last election in 2020 it becomes obvious that the bureaucrats and politicians are the ones who are causing the stress levels to rise in a large section of the general public.
The number of public service employees has increased significantly since this government took office and many of those bureaucrats are professional public servants who do not have much experience in the commercial world outside of government circles.
Their lack of real world commercial experience often leading to a situation where they make decisions and recommend policies which are seen to be practicable solutions based on either government or academic criteria, but when judged against the reality of the commercial world they are often logistical failures which are not fit for purpose.
It then becomes the problem of the taxpayers to convince the bureaucrats that they have made a mistake and this causes much anxiety and stress along with the costs involved which then leads to elevated levels of mental ill-health across the general population.
These same issues are faced by the NZ taxpayers at a Local body level where many of the council bureaucrats are also lacking in experience in the commercial world outside of the local bodies, yet they often (wrongly) believe that they know best what should be done on behalf of the taxpayers.
When there is a concern over a policy that’s not working often the only way to really fix it is to ask someone from outside the bureaucracy to manage the process of making the policies fit for purpose.
The bureaucrats of New Zealand are for ever making changes to policy that hasn’t worked and never will, often because they have never had to use these unhelpful policies.