Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey said the government is on track to double number of clinical psychologists. Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii
The government is on track to double the number of clinical psychologists trained in the country, the Mental Health Minister says.
Health New Zealand has released an updated plan to grow the mental health and addiction workforce, which remains under significant strain with pressure across services.
Minister Matt Doocey said the frontline workforce had grown by about 10 percent over the past year and there had been good progress in areas such as clinical psychology.
"We had a target of growing the number of clinical psychology internship places from 40 to 60. The latest data I've seen we've now grown that to 76 so we're on target to double the amount of clinical psychologists that we're training," he said.
Universities had also added 12 places to clinical psychology training programmes as part of work to tackle a 12.6 percent vacancy rate.
Doocey said growing the Health NZ-funded psychiatry workforce remained the biggest challenge, with an almost 20 percent vacancy rate.
"We have also made it a priority to grow the number of stage one psychiatrist registrar training positions available each year, it has gone from 33 in 2024 to 54 in 2026," he said.
Doocey said the government had set a target of training 500 mental health and addiction professionals each year.
349 people had begun training in semester one, he said.
"We're on track to meet that 500 target by the end of the year. What we do know is there's too many workforce vacancies that stop people getting the timely access to support they need," he said.
"At the one-year mark, it's appropriate that Health NZ is updating the plan. This gives us the opportunity to acknowledge early gains, introduce new actions, and target workforce pressures."
The workforce plan included improving training opportunities for enrolled nurses, establishing workforce training to respond to methamphetamine-related harm, growing and developing the forensic workforce and reviewing growth in psychology hubs to build more psychology training capacity.
Doocey said increasing the addiction workforce was a priority in order to tackle growing methamphetamine use.
"What we've seen from wastewater testing is that the recorded meth use has doubled. We're also seeing through other data the number of people reporting daily use in the last six months has doubled as well. We've got to take a range of prevention and early intervention approaches," he said.
"Two weeks ago, the government announced its plan to combat meth harm, allocating $30 million to increase the number of available services, including $6 million to grow the frontline addiction workforce."
Health NZ mentally well interim director Lisa Gestro said progress had been made but more work was needed to tackle pressures facing services.
"We know that this workforce is essential for New Zealanders to access the care they need when they experience mental distress or problems with addiction," she said.
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