20th of June 2024, 7:12pm
Legislative Council of Victoria, Spring Street, Melbourne
David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan):
My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Health. The number of publicly funded drug rehabilitation services across the board in Victoria is woefully inadequate. Based on the most recent figures, there are less than 500 publicly funded rehabilitation beds in the state. These are beds in structured residential programs like Odyssey House or Windana, for example, where people can receive the treatment and support they need to address their drug use. That is a ratio of 0.74 beds per 10,000 people. By way of comparison, only South Australia has a lower ratio.
Whilst there are clearly not enough residential rehabilitation beds to meet the surging need in Victoria for longer term alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment, the situation is worse for publicly funded residential withdrawal – detox beds. There are currently only about 110 in Victoria. This means there is a bottleneck at the detox end. People needing to access those longer-term rehabilitation services have to go through detox first. They need to be free from those immediate withdrawal symptoms before they can get into residential rehab. There are four times as many residential rehab beds as there are residential detox beds in Victoria. This disparity between the number of residential rehab beds and residential detox beds results in critical and often life-threatening delays to people’s recovery.
Desperate people may try their luck in the unregulated private sector; however, as revealed in the health complaints commissioner’s Review of Private Health Service Providers Offering Alcohol and Other Drug Rehabilitation and Counselling Services in Victoria, the costs of private AOD rehabilitation services are prohibitive, and as the services are unregulated, they mostly do not meet appropriate clinical quality and government standards. The report in 2022 had 21 recommendations for government which have not been actioned despite the fact that the government commissioned the report. The action I seek is twofold: that the minister urgently fund more detox beds to ease the rehabilitation bottleneck and the government incorporates the health complaints commissioner’s recommendations into its statewide AOD action plan.
[Awaiting response]
