Mental Health Australia and project partners are calling on consumers and carers from multicultural communities to join an advisory group that will be a key source of advice to the National Multicultural Mental Health Project. The project represents a national focus on mental health for people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and aims to aims to support service providers to improve cultural responsiveness and accessibility. Click here to find out more and apply.

I have both some encouragement and some disappointment this week regarding the future of the MHiMA Project. 

I’ve recently received a letter from the Minister for Health advising the Australian Government has agreed to continue to support the MHiMA Project beyond December 2016 and will undertake a targeted competitive approach to market some time in 2017 to determine the long term project lead. While it is still unclear at this stage what the future project will look like, I see this as a positive step towards providing long term certainty and investment in multicultural mental health. 

Mental Health Australia has been offered another six month MHiMA Project extension while this process occurs. However, as previously advised, and noting the damage (at least 3) short term MHiMA Project contract extensions have had on the multicultural mental health sector, we will not accept this offer. Current project activities will be completed by 31 December 2016.  Our sincere thanks go to the dedicated NCCCWG who have served the project so passionately to this point, but whose terms will finish with the end of the project. The MHiMA website, including the Framework elements, will be maintained while the process to determine the future project lead is undertaken.

While this iteration of the MHiMA Project will close at the end of the year, Mental Health Australia will continue to do all we can to secure effective long term investment in multicultural mental health. 

As we wrap up of project activities, I’m also pleased to advise we have finally received permission to publicly release the ‘recommendations for future directions report’, which we developed in consultation with the multicultural mental health sector and provided to Government in March 2016. You can read the report and attachments here.

We had the chance to meet with the MHiMA Project Advisory Group this week.  The group shared at disappointment that we are still awaiting a government decision on the future of the MHiMA project, and expressed their concerns that after the substantial input from the MHiMA NCCCWG it was difficult to see any concrete strategies to address CALD mental health in the consultation draft of the Fifth Plan. 

The group agreed to share resources and ideas in order to ensure that CALD issues are well articulated as part of the consultation process for the Fifth Plan, in the hope of a final plan that takes concrete action to address the substantial disadvantage that CALD communities face.