We can’t afford to lose what's working in mental health support. MIFWA's Hospital to Home program is set to close due to lack of government funding, a program that provides critical support to people being discharged from hospital mental health units. 

MIFWA has announced that due to no immediate funding commitment from the Commonwealth, it will have no option but to close its Hospital to Home program (H2H) from all its six partner hospital mental health units in June 2026 when the Commonwealth funding expires.

The program was established through a WA Primary Health Alliance innovation grant in 2017 and then funded through the Commonwealth’s Information, Linkages and Capacity Building (ILC) program. It is a peer-led mental health support service embedded across six Perth metropolitan hospitals. It connects people leaving hospital with lived-experience peer workers who provide practical, recovery-oriented support: regular check-ins, appointment accompaniment, help with daily tasks, navigation of the mental health system, and connection to community supports so people can stay safe and well.

In December 2025, the Department of Social Services advised H2H no longer fits within ILC priorities and should be treated as a State Government responsibility. The Commonwealth funding expires in June 2026. The cost to deliver the program across six hospitals is around $750,000 per year.

In other words: the program is being pushed from one side of government to the other — and patients are at risk of becoming collateral damage.

But we can’t afford to lose what’s working in mental health support. MIFWA’s Hospital to Home program has almost a decade of evidence:

There’s a point in our mental health system where we can either set people up to recover — or watch them slide back into crisis. It’s not the moment someone is admitted to hospital. It’s the moment they leave.

The days and weeks after discharge from an acute mental health unit are widely recognised as a high-risk period for suicide and hospital readmission. That’s when the structure of inpatient care disappears overnight, when follow-up appointments can be hard to secure, when isolation returns, and when the practical realities of life — housing, medication, transport, groceries — come crashing back in.

For nine years, the program has helped keep people steady — and is doing it well. The results are not vague or aspirational — they are measurable:

In FY2025, 396 people were referred to H2H. The program delivered 4,324+ hours of peer and community support and supported 215 people through their recovery journeys. Participant satisfaction sits in the “excellent” range, with a Net Promoter Score of 94 out of 100. Demand is increasing, with 10–15 new referrals every week across the six hospital sites. This is not a program searching for relevance — it is one struggling to keep up with need.

The human impact behind those numbers is even clearer. One participant described their experience like this:

“I felt like I could face the world again.”

That’s what good transition support looks like: not just “service contact”, but a practical restoration of confidence, hope, and connection. In the program’s participant feedback, people consistently report increased confidence and self-esteem, reduced isolation, improved ability to seek and accept help, and tangible gains in day-to-day functioning and independence. These are the real-world protective factors that reduce relapse and keep people out of emergency departments and inpatient beds.

So why is this proven service now at risk?

Not because it doesn’t work. Not because the hospitals don’t value it. Not because the community doesn’t need it. But because government funding responsibility has become stuck in a bureaucratic handover.

Without an immediate funding commitment, MIFWA has had to advise its partners, staff and the community that it will have no option but to close this program within weeks. That means patients will sit on wards without access to a proven pathway to community connection. It also means losing a specialised peer workforce — people with lived experience — who cannot simply be “paused” and reassembled later as if nothing happened. Once that workforce disperses, rebuilding it takes time, recruitment, training, and renewed trust with hospital partners.

If we’re serious about easing pressure on hospitals and supporting recovery, we must protect the services that hold people steady during that transition.

This is where the public deserves honesty: a service pause isn’t a neutral event. It breaks relationships, disrupts hospital pathways, and removes a safety net at the most vulnerable point in the system.

Importantly, we are not asking government to abandon process or skip evaluation. MIFWA has a detailed submission before the Mental Health Commission, which has in principle supported the program. We understand evaluation and budget cycles. But what we cannot accept — and what WA should not accept — is a preventable gap in support caused by timing and administrative limbo.

The solution is practical and proportionate: provide emergency transitional State funding to keep Hospital to Home operating while the longer-term decision is finalised. That is precisely what “transitional funding” is for: preventing avoidable harm while government completes its due diligence.

WA’s hospital system is under sustained pressure. We can’t claim to be serious about reducing readmissions and supporting recovery — then shrug when a proven discharge support program is forced to pause because two levels of government haven’t finalised who holds the chequebook.

When a program is working, the public expects government to resolve responsibility quickly — not let service continuity become the casualty of administrative drift.

The call is simple: Fund the bridge. Keep the doors open. Don’t discharge people into a funding gap.
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Sign the petition to oppose closure of life-saving mental health program for people being discharged from hospital mental health units 
MIFWA has launched this online petition urging State and Commonwealth to make an urgent commitment to fund the Hospital to Home program and provide emergency transitional State funding to keep Hospital to Home operating while the longer-term decision is finalised. Sign the petition and share it with your community – the more voices, the stronger we are together.

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Monique Williamson,
Chief Executive Officer of the Mental Illness Fellowship of Western Australia (MIFWA). 
mifwa.org.au