Kia ora,

It has been great to see many people from across the sector at recent conferences and events I’ve been at. I really enjoy connecting and hearing what’s happening in all different aspects of mental health and addiction work.

We are making good progress in the Access and Choice programme with one Request for Proposal now closed and two more closing on Tuesday next week. The two that close next week for the expansion or replication of Māori and Pacific mental health and addiction services. We’re expecting a number of these services to come on stream or build capacity from early in 2020.

We will also have two further RFPs opening early in 2020 which are for new Māori and Pacific services. What we’ll be looking for in these RFPs will be informed by what we’ve heard through the Māori Hui we ran in September and October and the upcoming Pacific fono/workshops. Fono will be held in Auckland, Wellington, Napier and Christchurch. There will be more information available in the coming weeks about these.

When we held the Māori hui, we committed to staying true to the voices we heard and providing a summary of verbatim comments for attendees and these available on the Ministry’s website. The next step is that we are ensuring the key themes from these comments are developed through external analysis via a Māori lens.

We’ll keep you informed with progress on this work.