NSW Mental Health Gap Analysis: the need for transparent data

A long-awaited NSW Government report on gaps in mental health services has raised important questions about how we measure — and report — unmet need.

As reported in The Sydney Morning Herald, the report did not identify individual Local Health Districts or show how much unmet need there was in each area. Instead, districts were compared with the NSW average, rather than with a target based on how much care their communities actually need.

ASoP Director Prof. Steve Kisely questioned how useful this comparison is:

“What people want to know is: is the system working for them? Not whether the system is working as poorly as somewhere else.”

The findings still point to major gaps. NSW had the second-highest level of unmet demand for psychosocial support in Australia, and almost no mental health service nationally was meeting the level of need estimated by the National Mental Health Service Planning Framework.

For ASoP, this shows why clear and transparent mental health data matters. We need to know what care people need, how much of that need is being met and where the biggest gaps are.

Good data helps governments plan services, direct funding where it is most needed and track whether that investment is actually improving care — particularly for people living with severe and complex mental illness. Full article: here Full NSW gap analysis: here