Governments should stop treating funding for mental health as too difficult, the country's peak medical body says, with the public system accused of failing patients.
The outlook for mental health patients in hospitals is only going to worsen, with more staff leaving the profession due to burnout, according to a new Australian Medical Association report.
Patients waited an average of seven hours in emergency departments before being admitted to hospital in the 2022/23 financial year, the association's latest mental health Public Hospital Report Card found.
Some 52 per cent of them arrived with police or by ambulance and one in 10 spent more than 23 hours in emergency before receiving a bed.
The number of patients with mental illness triaged as an emergency more than doubled over a period of 12 years.
The association's president Danielle McMullen said the system was grappling with a "logjam" as there were just 27 specialised mental health beds per 100,000 people, the lowest capacity figure on record.
She said federal, state and territory governments needed to do better in financing public health.
"We need all governments to stop putting this in the too-hard basket. We need them to invest in increasing the capacity of our mental health units," she told reporters in Canberra on Thursday.
"That's beds and the workforce needed to support them, and we need that investment in the community to keep as many people as healthy and out of hospital as we can."
Dr McMullen indicated more wrap-around support for mental health patients was also needed.
The peak body's emergency medicine representative Sarah Whitelaw said it would take a united effort to make improvements to the system.
"We need to stop the blame game; the idea that this is unavoidable isn't it," she said.
"We need to invest in all of the other parts of the system, not only our community and our primary mental health care systems but also all of those other what we call social determinants of health."
Dr McMullen said health systems were failing to provide appropriate levels of mental health care as a result of the funding situation.
"This situation is extremely distressing for the dedicated staff working in EDs, who are not supported or sufficiently resourced to manage patients with complex mental health issues who can become agitated when facing long waits for care.
"Tragically, these overcrowded and stressful situations can contribute to unsafe psychosocial work environments and staff burnout, and in the worst cases, assaults on staff."
