A new Productivity Commission report published this week has revealed one-third of mentally ill patients in waiting rooms are forced to wait unreasonably long times to receive care.
The report showed timely access to mental healthcare was at just 68 percent nationally in 2016-17, and in ‘semi-urgent’ and ‘non-urgent’ cases a patient could expect to wait more than two hours to receive the care they needed.
Professor Ian Hickie, from Sydney University's Brain and Mind Institute, says mentally ill Australians are presenting themselves to emergency rooms at an increasing rate because they feel as if they have nowhere else to turn.