Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Aged Care. Eating disorders among young people have skyrocketed during COVID, with clinics seeing demand increase by up to 85 per cent. Minister, mothers in Goldstein are pleading with me to do something before their children literally die of starvation due to lack of available care. I ask you: when will the government step in to help the states provide cohesive, one-stop mental and physical care for these children and young adults?

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to 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—

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Member for Goldstein, on a point of order?

Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's on relevance. The question to the minister was: when will the government step in?

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I give the call to the minister.

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

As I said, we need to keep working with the collaboration also to find better ways to prevent people from developing eating disorders in the first place. As the member knows, these drivers are complex and they have deep roots in our culture. They are issues of body image, advertising norms, the role of social media and much more.

I thank the member for her advocacy. We need to engage more between the Commonwealth and the states. I think I've outlined the way in which, to their credit, the former government did that. We've got much, much more to do, and I look forward to working with the member over coming months.