Mental health and addiction service monitoring report
Published: 31 May 2023
This mental health and addiction service monitoring report is the main report that monitors across the breadth of national-level data. It aims to show what is working well and what isn’t in mental health and addiction services, how this has changed over time, and advocate for improvements.
This report uses a wide range of data to monitor service performance, along with other published information, and case-studies from exemplar organisations.
Overall there has been good progress with investment and increased access to primary services, although there has been a reduction in access to specialist services, increased prescribing and little or no change on many other measures
In addition:
- Fewer people used specialist services, primary mental health initiatives, telehealth and online services than the previous year, but many people are accessing new services being rolled out under the Access and Choice programme
- Workforce vacancies in specialist adult mental health and addiction services have doubled between 2018 and 2022, and we want to see a clear strategy and roadmap to address growing workforce shortages
- Coercive practices continue to be widely used, particularly for Māori and Pacific peoples. All services need to urgently address these inequities, and we want to see more by Māori, for Māori approaches, such as kaupapa Māori services
- There have been substantial increases in medication dispensing, particularly for young people, and this warrants investigation whether young people have a full range of treatment options available.
- This report is accompanied by supplementary data tables including a subset of measures, and soon we will release our online dashboard with the full measure set. The subset of measures included in the supplementary data tables were chosen to support the report’s key findings.
