Hague Kevin: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 03 May 2016. Volume:713;Page:10670. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): I want to talk about one particular area in health and that is the area of mental health which is one that historically has been poorly dealt with by Governments right around the world including ours. Perhaps it is because of our fear of mental illness—that we may be affected by it—that we have chosen instead to put people in the bin and to put them out of sight in those big psychiatric institutions. I am thinking of Kingseat Hospital Seacliff Lunatic Asylum Seaview Asylum Carrington/Oakley Hospital—successors of Bedlam. They were nasty places to be.In the 1980s and 1990s in this country we had two forces that were changing that: one was the process of deinstitutionalisation and the other was several reports led by Judge Ken Mason. The Mason reports led to a very substantial increase in funding for mental health services and led to the creation of the Mental Health Commission. The commission itself did an extraordinary amount of good work. It developed the Blueprint for Mental Health Services in New Zealand: How Things Need to Be it developed a ring-fence for mental health funding to ensure money that was intended for mental health services could not be spent elsewhere and it ensured there was ongoing oversight of the implementation of the blueprint. Under the watch of the Mental Health Commission we saw steady improvement. We saw more services we saw greater capacity and we saw a pretty substantial increase in people’s health.The commission moved on to primary mental health with Blueprint II but now things are going backwards. They are going backwards because the ring-fence does not really exist any longer and so district health boards which are under substantial financial pressure are choosing instead to use dollars that were intended for mental health services for other services. Things are going backwards because there is no longer a top-line target for mental health services. The point of targets is to increase focus and effort on those particular areas with the consequence that those areas that are not targeted will have less focus less resource and less effort and sadly mental health is one of those. We have seen the Mental Health Commission disbanded and replaced with a single Mental Health Commissioner whose focus is on individual complaints and not on the kind of systemic oversight and improvement that we actually need.The Ministry of Health recently conducted a review of the Waikato District Health Board’s mental health services after a series of tragic events under that district health board. It found that staff working in mental health had very low morale it found that the planning and funding department was paying a price below the national price for mental health services it found that staffing ratios meant that clinical staff in mental health were having to try to care for more people than was appropriate and it found that vacancies in mental health staffing were being held open to enable the district health board to save money. Those shortcomings are echoed amongst other district health boards: Northland Capital and Coast Southern Canterbury. They are the signs of a sector that is under severe financial pressure—severe financial pressure that is stretching our mental health services not only to breaking point but beyond breaking point.People like Nicky Stevens have paid the price for that underfunding for having that eye off the ball with their lives. It is now time for an urgent nationwide inquiry into the state of this country’s mental health services.