What the Royal Commission said
The Royal Commission called for a new Performance Monitoring and Accountability Framework. The Framework will:
- assist Regional Mental Health and Wellbeing Boards (see Recommendation 4) to help service providers improve
- enhance outcomes and experiences of consumers, families, carers and supporters; and
- help understand if consumers, families, carers and supporters are benefitting from services.
Performance monitoring helps ensure services are delivering better experiences and outcomes for consumers, families, carers and supporters. It also provides clarity between the Department of Health and service providers about service delivery expectations and supports improvement.
What are the opportunities?
A new approach to performance monitoring will help make service providers more accountable. It will also ensure the views and perspectives of consumers, families, carers and supporters are central.
Previous performance monitoring and accountability arrangements for mental health services provide strong foundations, but are limited. This is because they focus only on clinical mental health services. A new approach will hold all providers of Victorian Government-funded mental health and wellbeing services to account.
Current performance monitoring arrangements rarely focus on the experiences of consumers, carers, families and supporters. They also don't measure things across the range of services people need to support their mental health and wellbeing.
The Royal Commission was told it is important to monitor and hold to account all service providers in a consistent way. This also helps providers compare or benchmark themselves against others.
What are we doing?
We are developing a new Mental Health and Wellbeing Outcomes and Performance Framework (see also Recommendation 1). People with lived experience are helping design it.
The new Framework will include:
- overarching outcomes or key performance indicators
- consumer‑completed measures and family‑carer‑and‑supporter‑completed measures to track progress
- a performance improvement process that identifies performance concerns and supports performance improvement plans.
These features are the same as international performance monitoring and accountability arrangements. The Framework will be used to collect, analyse and share meaningful data.
The Royal Commission recommended the Framework align with the categories used the National Mental Health Performance Framework 2020, based on the Australian Health Performance Framework.
The Royal Commission called for a data collection process that captures information about:
- different groups, including Aboriginal people and culturally-diverse people
- different geographic areas, including rural and regional areas
- the different needs of consumers.
Reviewed 10 October 2024