A named person who stays. And answers when your family calls.
Your taxes fund a mental health system built to catch people in a crisis and let them go in between.
On the bus to Sydney Uni, a woman, obviously very unwell, grabbed my face and attacked me. My only option was the police, who never found her. She needed care, and there was no one to call for it. I see the same gap dispatching for Community Health Support.
What's going on
In 1983 NSW promised that as its big psychiatric hospitals shrank, care in the community would replace them. The hospitals shrank. The community care was never properly built. So the system only catches people in a crisis. A hospital stay ends, a case closes, someone stops turning up, and nobody follows up.
By the numbers
Who pays
Police and paramedics, sent to do a job that should have been done weeks earlier.
The person who's sick, discharged with nobody checking in until the next crisis.
The taxpayer, paying for emergency visits and hospital stays, the most expensive parts of the system, again and again.
The family, raising the alarm and not being heard. The Bondi Junction inquest found one mother raised concerns about her son at least seven times, and they weren't taken seriously enough.
What I'll do
- 01
A named person who stays.
I'll fund Mental Health Care Coordinators. They aren't clinicians, and each looks after no more than 15 people at a time, so they can stay through a move, a change of doctor or a stretch of not answering. Help is offered, never imposed, and if someone steps back the door stays open.
- 02
Based where people already trust.
Coordinators work from community organisations people already rely on, like community health services, Aboriginal community controlled health organisations, and multicultural and LGBTQ+ health services. They're funded for the people they're actually supporting, not for signing up new ones.
- 03
A real line in for families.
Each coordinator's Local Health District has a named contact who must answer within a set time, and any refusal is written down with reasons and can be escalated. When a family raises the alarm, it counts, even if the person they're worried about has stepped back.
- 04
Mental illness and addiction, together.
People with both get bounced between services. Coordinators hold both, and make the services work together.
What it costs
About $12 to 15 million over two years for a pilot of 50 coordinators across Sydney and regional NSW, supporting up to 750 people at a time. That includes an outside evaluation at 18 months. If it works, it grows statewide on the evidence.
Proof it works
NSW already knows steady support in the community works. In NSW's main community support programs for people with serious mental illness, hospital admissions fell by 74 per cent after people joined, and the state saved about $86,000 per person over five years. Coordinators bring that steady contact to people those programs don't reach.
What changes for you
If someone you love gets sick, there's a person whose job is to stay. You'll have someone to call, and they'll have the standing to make the system call back.