Auditor-General’s report, Mental health

The Auditor-General’s report Mental health: Effectiveness of the planning to discharge people from hospital was presented to the House of Representatives today.

We carried out a performance audit that looked at discharge planning for people who had been admitted to a hospital-based mental health inpatient unit. We looked at whether discharge planning met people’s individual needs and helped to make sure they received the services they needed. This is a relatively small group of people, but they are the most unwell and require a high level of care.

We analysed data for all district health boards, reviewed practices at three district health boards, and considered the views of a broad range of people directly involved in delivering services.

Overall, discharge planning and the associated follow-up work for people who are being discharged should be done much better. We found that the quality and completeness of transition planning is variable and affected by pressures on mental health services. In some instances, transition plans are not followed through well, or well-coordinated across different teams and services.

In our view, improvements are urgently needed. The pressures on inpatient units and community services need to be addressed. Agencies in both the health and other sectors need to work together to address these pressures and make improvements.

The mental health sector has made progress in recent years in using information to understand service performance and how to make improvements. The sector holds a lot of data about mental health patients and their contact with mental health services. We encourage the health sector to use this data better to understand how people interact with mental health services so that services can be improved in a way that will achieve better outcomes.

The Ministry of Health and district health boards are working on changes to improve mental health service delivery, including to better support people in moving from inpatient to community mental health services. The effectiveness of these changes in delivering better results for people with acute mental health problems is yet to be determined.

• A two-page summary of this report is also available.

• Watch a video about how we collected and analysed data for our audit.

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