GPs deal with 10m mental health visits

Australians made almost 10 million visits to their GPs for mental health problems last financial year, a new report shows.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) report also found almost 200,000 Australians were admitted to hospital due to some form of mental illness in 2003-04, the latest period for which figures are available.

The AIHW said mental health problems accounted for almost 11 per cent of all problems managed by GPs last financial year.

"There were about 9.8 million attendances (during 2004/05) in which general practitioners managed mental health problems," the report said.

It said the number of visits to GPs for mental health-related care had been relatively stable since 1999.

In 2003-04, there were almost five million visits to publicly-funded mental health services.
"The care that people with mental health problems receive most often is care in the community from GPs or government-operated health services, rather than from hospitalisations," said Jenny Hargreaves, head of AIHW's hospitals and mental health services unit.

She said men sought assistance more often for mental health problems than women.
"There were 256 service contacts per 1,000 people for men, compared with 226 for women," Ms Hargreaves said.

But she said that was not surprising given that one of the more common conditions treated in government-funded mental health care was schizophrenia, which is more common in men.

Between 1999-2004 the number of mental health-related admissions to hospitals increased at an average annual rate of just over two per cent to 197,712 for that year, the report said.

Schizophrenia accounted for the highest number of hospital admissions with specialised psychiatric care at 19 per cent, followed by a depressive episode at 16 per cent.

The report found that for patients who did not receive specialised psychiatric care while in hospital, the most common diagnosis was mental and behavioural disorders due to alcohol use at 17 per cent.

For patients whose hospital visit involved specialised psychiatric care, the number of admissions was highest for those living in major cities and lowest for those in remote areas.
The opposite was true for patients who did not receive specialised psychiatric care while in hospital.

The AIHW said there were 14 psychiatrists per 100,000 people in Australia in 2003.
However, remote areas had only 2.5 psychiatrists per 100,000 people, compared to 18.5 in major cities.

The report also said there were more than 12,800 mental health nurses per 100,000 people in that year.

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