Mental Health Review — Admission and Discharge Practices
1097. Hon ALISON XAMON to the Minister for Mental Health:
I refer to the ministerial statement given by the minister last Thursday, announcing a review into discharge practices.
(1) Will the minister be making the outcomes of this review public?
(2) If so, when is it anticipated that this will occur?
(3) If the review will not be made public, why not?
Hon HELEN MORTON replied:
(1)–(3) I thank the member for the question, again, and the opportunity to talk a bit about this review. The issue of the review is that it will be undertaken, as I said before, by an independent reviewer and investigation team that will be contracted, and that report will be provided jointly to the Mental Health Commission and the Department of Health, and they in turn will provide it to me. In terms of the report being made public, the issue that I have is that if the report that I receive does not contain personalised information about individuals—that is, the sort of information that needs to be sensitised in some way so that it does not provide personal details to the public—I will be very happy to make it public. However, I do feel that we need to consider the interests of individual people who might be really wanting and willing to provide very personal, very sensitive and very upsetting information to that review team. So, depending on the way that is recorded and documented and fed back to me, that will make the difference to me in terms of how much of the report is made public and how much needs to be looked at in terms of the sensitivities of those individuals. So in some respects I am waiting to see the outcome of the report before I can make a full consideration about that. My overall objective is to make as much of that report public as possible.