A Shorten Labor Government will boost mental health services in Melbourne’s south-east by delivering more inpatient mental health beds at Casey Hospital.

Labor will invest $22.4 million to meet rapidly rising demand for these services in this growing area, taking pressure off the hospital’s emergency department.
 
This project will ensure people in this region with severe mental ill health can access improved models of care in acute and high dependency beds.
 
It will also ensure hospital staff and other patients are kept safe.

Labor’s funding will see an existing sub-acute space converted into a mental health unit with single bedrooms and a range of patient and staff support areas.

This capital project will be funded out of Labor’s $2.8 billion Better Hospitals Fund.
 
And it will come on top of the extra $29.2 million of core funding we will deliver for the hospitals in Monash Health, more than reversing Scott Morrison’s cruel cuts.

That will be part of approximately $635 million in extra funding for Victorian hospitals.

It also comes on top of Labor’s plan to provide better support for new parents and their children in this area by establishing a new Early Intervention Parenting Centre in Pakenham.
 
The population of this region of south-east of Melbourne is booming, almost doubling from 58,000 in 2006 to more than 100,000 in 2017. The population is expected to almost double again over the next 20 years.
 
That’s why Labor is committed to investing in new services like these. We can afford it because we’re cracking down on multinationals and closing tax loopholes for the top end of town.
 
The Liberals, on the other hand, just cut and cut and cut from health.
 
Scott Morrison had a chance to reverse his cuts to hospitals in this month’s Budget, but instead he locked them in for another six years.
 
Labor will reverse his cuts, strengthen Medicare, invest $2.3 billion to drive down the cost of cancer care, and make private health insurance more affordable.

Only Labor can be trusted to deliver the health and hospital services Australians need.