More recruitment leading to shorter wait times for mental health patients, govt says

Source: Radio New Zealand

More mental health and addiction workers are training and entering the workforce meaning shorter wait times for patients, according to the government’s latest data on targets.

The targets, set in 2025

• 80 percent of people accessing specialist mental health and addiction services are seen within three weeks
• 80 percent of people accessing primary mental health and addiction services through the Access and Choice programme are seen within one week
• 95 percent of mental health and addiction related emergency department presentations are admitted, discharged, or transferred from an emergency department within six hours
• Train 500 mental health and addiction professionals each year
• 25 percent of mental health and addiction investment is allocated towards prevention and early intervention

Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey said the workforce had increased more than 11 percent since he came into office.

There were 514 new mental health and addiction professionals trained over the past year, exceeding the target of 500 and up from 457 when reporting started, he said.

These roles included occupational therapists, social workers, registered nurses, clinical psychology interns, and Stage 1 psychiatry trainees.

Seventy-four clinical psychology interns had been funded, exceeding the 2025 target of 60.

“We are also seeing record uptake in psychiatry training, with 48 junior doctors entering Stage 1 training last year, up from 33 in 2024,” he said.

Travelling around the country, Doocey said, the most common complaint he heard was that long wait times were preventing people accessing support – and those wait lists were long because of staff shortages, he said.

Growing the workforce included attracting international talent, and retaining existing staff.

Renumeration was one consideration, he said, but most of these workers were attracted to a profession in which they could make a difference.

“Something I heard loud and clear when I first came into office is there was a lot of burnout. People were, quite frankly, covering too many vacant roles and that was leading people to leave. So now we’ve [been] able to greatly reduce our vacancy rates, more people are staying satisfied and staying in-role longer.”

The effect for patients

“A recent report from the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission backs that wait times have decreased due to there being more specialist mental health workers compared to March 2023,” Doocey said.

Nationally, 83 percent of people were being seen within one week for primary mental health support, and nearly 82 percent of people seeking specialist support were seen within three weeks – both exceeding the target of 80 percent.

Funding

For the first time, they had hit the target for 25 percent of mental health funding – about $2.8 billion – to be spent on prevention and early intervention.

That guaranteed money was being spent on things like support in schools, or at the perinatal and postnatal stages for maternal mental health, Doocey said.

“It’s vitally important,” he said. “Historically in mental health what we would do is wait for someone to get into a time of crisis before we provided them with a level of service, and that classically took someone who had lifelong and enduring mental illness to about the age of 35 or 40 before they’d first engage.”

Early intervention could prevent issues from escalating later, he said.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/03/25/more-recruitment-leading-to-shorter-wait-times-for-mental-health-patients-govt-says/