Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her question and for her deep interest and engagement on this issue already, along with a number of other colleagues on the crossbench. We've already met twice, I think, about this issue. I know she's also had a consultation with the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for Mental Health and former chief psychiatrist of Victoria, Professor Ruth Vine, and is also engaging with the state government down in Victoria.

The member is right: eating disorders are a devastating range of mental health conditions. As the member knows and as I think all members in this House know, they tend to strike in adolescence and in young adulthood. It's an incredibly promising and exciting time of life but also a very vulnerable time. They're devastating for the individual and they're incredibly distressing, as the member has pointed out in her question, for those who love and are caring for patients with an eating disorder. They're difficult to treat and they're very, very dangerous, with the highest mortality rate of any single mental health condition. And the member is right: COVID has driven a very big increase in cases, with no evidence yet that that spike is starting to recover.

Even before COVID, we knew that most people with eating disorders were not receiving a proper diagnosis and that about 80 per cent were not receiving evidence based treatment. To his credit, the former minister, Greg Hunt, put in place Medicare services to provide up to 40 psychology sessions and 20 dietician sessions for people with eating disorders. In just three years of that availability, tens of thousands of patients have received almost five million sessions of care under that program.

Right now, we have $20 million in grants out to tender to provide better community based supports for people with eating disorders, and the Commonwealth, as the member knows, has funded all states to build new residential treatment services for eating disorders. A Victorian centre is also being constructed in Armadale as part of Alfred Health. The sooner they can be completed and opened, obviously, the better.

But the member is right: we need more targeted services that get to people when and where they need them rather than seeing people cycle through hospital emergency departments. We need to keep working with the National Eating Disorders Collaboration to—

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