AAPi Director Carly Dober spoke with Canberra radio station 2CC about the lack of adequate psychology sessions under Medicare to address the mental health needs of the nation.
"The government's own review (of Better Access) recommended keeping the additional ten sessions for those who had more complex needs," she said.
"Unfortunately, the extra ten sessions didn't magically create more psychologists in the regions. And removing the extra ten psychologists also didn't magically create more psychologists in the regions.
"There's never been enough psychologists to meet the demand of people who need psychology sessions, especially when mental health rates are trending upward due to things like the current economic crisis that we're experiencing.
"We've got about 8,000 provisional psychologists that are in Australia, right now, and these are people who have done the first four years of education. They're fully supervised. We often recommend that the government could make a Medicare code for them to see lower tier mental health challenges like anxiety or depression. And that would immediately give us another 8,000 psychologists all over the country."
Listen to the full interview here.