Te Huringa is our first mental health services and addiction services monitoring report, following transfer of the service monitoring function from the previous Mental Health Commissioner to Te Hiringa Mahara. It shows the performance of mental health services and addiction services between 2016 / 17 and 2020 / 21.
The report covers mental health services and addiction services funded by the public health system, including the following:
Primary mental health services and addiction services that are provided within a general practice – this includes extended general practitioner (GP) or nurse consultations, brief psychological interventions, individually tailored packages of care (which cover a variety of services, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, medication reviews, counselling, and other psychosocial interventions), and group therapy.
Specialist mental health services and addiction services funded by DHBs or the Ministry of Health – these services are provided by DHBs or NGOs. Specialist services include a range of services for people experiencing moderate to severe mental illness or psychological distress. They include acute inpatient services, community-based services, talking therapies, and forensic services. Most specialist services are delivered in community settings rather than inpatient or forensic settings.
The report shows that there has been little evidence of improvement in services over the past five years and little change in wait times for specialist mental health services. Wait times for young people to access specialist mental health services continue to be well below target. Furthermore, the wait times for addiction services have increased over the past five years.
Despite calls in 2018 from He Ara Oranga(external link) to minimise coercive treatment, our measures show an overall increase in the use of solitary confinement (seclusion) and no decrease in the use of community treatment orders.
The findings and a list of changes we want to see can be found in the report's overall summary.
The access and activity measures in Te Huringa related to the existing DHB funded primary mental health services, and did not include access to the new services that are part of the Access and Choice programme. This is because there is no accurate data for the total number of people using the Access and Choice services for the period covered in this report. The percentage of the total population accessing DHB funded primary mental health services is between 2.7 – 3.0 % over the last five years reported.
Our recent report(external link) into the Access and Choice programme found that the programme has put much-needed investment into primary and community care. The programme intends to provide 325,000 people (6.5 % of the total population) with mild to moderate mental health and addiction needs with free and immediate support.
We released Te Huringa: Change and Transformation. Mental Health Service and Addiction Service Monitoring Report 2022 [PDF, 888 KB](external link) on 22 March 2022. Te Huringa monitors the performance of mental health services and addictions services between 2016 / 17 and 2020 / 21. Te Huringa describes what is working well, what is not, and how this has changed over time.
Te Huringa found that:
You can read the news story that accompanies our report on our website news page(external link)(external link).
Te Huringa is a transitional report that monitors services using an adapted version of the former Mental Health Commissioner’s framework, while we develop our monitoring framework He Ara Āwhina (Pathways to Support).
Our He Ara Āwhina framework was released on 30 June 2022.
