National e-Bulletin
30 June 2010
Dear [FirstName],
Mental Health Update - Consultation with Department of Health and Ageing
As you know, 35 members and 15 Occupational Therapists went to Canberra to take part in a consultation with Minister Roxon and senior staff in the Department of Health and Ageing last Thursday. It was great to meet those who attended and to hear their contributions to the consultation with the Department and the Minister’s office.
I’d like to thank those members again for their energy, passion and intelligent contributions to the consultation meeting.
We are waiting for notes from the meeting to come from the Department, the powerpoint presentations given by the officials and the write up of notes from the group sessions. When I receive these I will post them on the members’ forum for all to read. But in the interim I wanted to provide you with at least a brief report of the meeting and to begin to describe the next steps for our work on this issue.
I have written today to Nicola Roxon and Julia Gillard, asking them to treat social workers equitably with other professions. Specifically I have asked them to take the decision back to Cabinet to have it reversed. I’ve made it clear that if they are unable to commit to this, the AASW will be lobbying against the measures when Parliament considers them.
The Minister’s chief of staff attended the forum for about an hour on a day when she probably had 2 hours sleep and was working in a frenzy. The events of the morning and night before, with Julia Gillard becoming the new Prime Minister, were unexpected, so for her to participate was a statement about their commitment to hear from us and members.
The Department's officials spent the day hearing many valuable insights from members and OTs, we will follow up to ensure they take them on board and incorporate into policy as well.
Georgie Harman, First Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Chronic Disease spoke and took questions extensively. The other officials speaking were Virginia Hart and Colleen Krestensen, they are both senior staff (branch managers) in mental health.
I wanted to re-cap the objectives we had for the day, as well as the longer term policy lines.
At the end of the day we anticipated that:
• DoHA and the Minister’s office would have a better understanding of the roles, skills, expertise, experience and innovation in Social Workers and OT’s practice.
• Members would know what is to happen with their feedback
• We would have a program of further consultation
• We would all have a greater understanding of the funding arrangements available to assist in delivering good outcomes for those with mental health issues.
My sense is that we have achieved a great deal of these objectives:
DoHA and the Minister’s office told us how valuable your information was and provided specific feedback to me about your contributions being useful.
We know they want your feedback to inform the Better Access evaluation and to shape the new ATAPS funding
Kandie is involved in the Better Access and ATAPS consultations reference groups and members who attended were asked to send in short submissions, which we are coordinating. We'll also ask the dept how they want to hear from the rest of our members.
I think we know more about what they want to do with ATAPS, I think we know they haven’t worked out a lot of the important details (for example are GPs the gatekeepers? They said it wasn’t yet decided. How much is available to a social worker as part of a package? They don’t yet know) Again, there are opportunities for us, as the AASW and as individual members, to continue to influence this in the future.
I also wanted to reiterate the policy objectives we have, so we can assess how well the Government is hearing these. Of course, we were never expecting to achieve all these objectives on the day, but being clear about our objectives will help us decide on our next steps.
So to reiterate, our policy remains:
• we want any decision about Better Access to be informed by the outcomes of the Review which reports at the end of this year;
• we will fight for social workers to remain part of Better Access while it exists;
• we expect to be treated equitably compared with other professions;
• we've also said that, whatever mental health policy the government wants to introduce, it must be client-centred, flexible, integrated and responsive to community needs.
Let the staff know your thoughts on these points, and how well you think the Government is responding to them.
In the meantime, it is still important that you continue any meetings you have arranged with MPs and your liaison with your local Divisions of General Practice.
Kind regards
Kandie
Kandie Allen-Kelly
BSocWk MPhil MAASW (Acc)
Chief Executive Officer
Australian Association of Social Workers
P.O. Box 4956
Kingston ACT 2604
Tel: +61 2 6232 3903
Membership: 1800 630 124
ceo@aasw.asn.au
www.aasw.asn.au
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