Dear supporters,

On the 6th of August when our petition reached over 3000 I sent it off to the Hon Greg Hunt's office. I received the standard automatic acknowledgment.

On the 11th of October I sent the following, to which I received the same automatic acknowledgment:

Dear Hon Greg Hunt,

I am exceptionally disappointed that this petition with over 3000 signatures did not receive a response from you. I attach the original email. Doubling the number of sessions for psychologists or even increasing their subsidy does not address the problem that highly competent psychotherapists with no history of avarice (unlike some guilds)  are entirely excluded from providing a subsidised service at a time when apparently there are huge waiting lists for services and massive gap fees being demanded for the provision of psychological strategies of low sophistication. I further wish to inform the minister that mental health nurses are the oldest regulated health profession next to medicine in Australia and the potential demise of this honourable specialty has been well documented and will likely be linked to the poor treatment delivered to it by the current Australian Government. I attach a number of vignettes which I will share at the inaugural mental health funding summit latter in the month to illustrate the absurdity of the current situation. Please address this inequitable, anticompetitive and discriminatory policy at the earliest opportunity and enable mental health nurses to access ‘Better Access’.

Sincerely,

Dr Richard Lakeman

The Australian Healthcare Funding Summit is being delivered as a virtual conference on the 25th & 26th of November. I will present the following:-

The case for equitable access to mental health nurse psychotherapists: Improving access and outcomes across the mental health continuum.

The Medicare Benefit Scheme (MBS), ‘Better Access’ program which focuses on providing subsidized focused psychological strategies is out of reach for large sections of the population due to the overvaluing of this service by eligible providers who charge excessive ‘gap fees’. Granting immediate eligibility to MHNs to claim the MBS will address a serious skills shortage in primary care across the continuum of stepped care without the need for any further investment in training or education of health professionals.

If you would like to attend this event. Apparently, the following code can confer a 15% discount: P20A09VPKR15. 

https://www.informa.com.au/event/conference/australian-healthcare-funding-summit/

My sincere thanks to those who have visited the recently published paper:

Lakeman, R., Cashin, A., Hurley, J., & Ryan, T. (2020). The psychotherapeutic practice and potential of mental health nurses: an Australian survey. Australian Health Review, -. https://doi.org/10.1071/AH19208

I am especially grateful to those who have started a twitter campaign about this article:

https://csiropublishing.altmetric.com/details/93499507/twitter

This is not something that I know much about. However, it is great to see twitter being used to promote something good. So please tweet away.

Regards

Richard Lakeman