Doocey announces $1.7m youth mental health respite service for Northland, following coroner report into six youth deaths

A new $1.7 million youth mental health respite service will open in Northland by the end of 2026, in response to a coroner’s findings that fragmented agencies and stretched clinicians failed six young Northlanders who died between 2018 and 2020.

Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey announced the funding this week, alongside three additional youth suicide prevention coordinator roles spread across the mid and Far North. The dedicated Youth Acute Respite Service is intended as an alternative to hospital admission, giving rangatahi in crisis a place to de-escalate and recover without being sent to Auckland’s Starship Hospital, currently the only inpatient option for young people in serious distress.

Doocey described the coroner’s report as “heartbreaking and damning” and said he had disagreed with Health New Zealand’s initial response to the findings. He said the new service would build a “more connected and less fragmented system” and “help guide young people to right support at the right time”, according to a Radio New Zealand report.

The funding will come out of the existing mental health and addiction budget rather than from new money. Officials are aiming to have the respite service operational by October, with the end of 2026 set as a hard deadline. The location within Northland has not yet been chosen, and the contract for delivery has not been publicly named.

The announcement responds to a coroner’s inquest held in November 2024 and reported back in December 2025, which examined six youth suicides in Northland between 2018 and 2020, including a child as young as 12. The coroner found families had run into repeated dead ends, with crisis lines, school counsellors, GPs and the specialist child and adolescent mental health service all pulling in different directions.

Evidence at the inquest revealed Te Roopu Kimiora, the regional child and adolescent mental health service, was managing 700 young people with moderate to high self-harm risk in Northland alone. Each clinician was carrying around 40 patients, well above the national norm. Families described being placed on waiting lists and not making it to the front of the queue in time.

Paula Mills, whose 15-year-old daughter Summer Metcalfe was one of the six, told 1News the system had let her family down. “If we can do anything to help these rangatahi and their whānau, let’s do it,” she said. Mills has spoken publicly about the wider failures, saying “our children were failed by this system and all its brokenness”.

Rachel McGillan, clinical nurse lead at Whangārei’s Youth Space service, said crisis presentations have become a daily occurrence. “There’s not a day I don’t have somebody who is talking about their suicide risk factors,” she told 1News.

Te Whatu Ora’s national director of mental health and addiction Selah Hart said the agency’s focus was on ensuring “no one falls through the gaps”. The Children’s Commissioner welcomed the announcement, citing the long distance Northland whānau currently face if their child needs inpatient mental health care in Auckland.

The acute respite service is designed to sit between community talking therapies and full hospital admission. Until now, Northland has had no equivalent option for young people in crisis. Doocey said the three new suicide prevention coordinators would be tasked with stitching together fragmented services across the region, so a young person presenting at one front door, whether that is a school, a GP clinic, an emergency department or a kaupapa Māori health provider, would be connected through to whatever care they need without having to restart the assessment from scratch.

Questions remain about scope. The published material does not specify whether the service will be run by Health New Zealand directly or contracted to a non-government provider, and the announcement did not confirm an upper age limit. That leaves uncertainty about whether the 19 to 25 year old bracket, where suicide rates are highest in New Zealand, will be included.

The coroner’s recommendations went well beyond a single respite service. They included a national review of how rural and provincial regions are resourced for youth mental health care, which has not been funded as part of this week’s announcement.

For Mills and the other bereaved Northland whānau, the funding is partial recognition of what the inquest exposed. Whether it will be enough to prevent another suicide cluster will depend on how quickly the service can be stood up, who is contracted to deliver it, and whether the wider workforce shortfalls in Te Roopu Kimiora can be addressed.

Anyone concerned about a young person in their life can contact the Mental Health Foundation, 1737 (free call or text any time), or Youthline on 0800 376 633.

What do you think of the new Northland respite service? Should the funding be matched in other regions where young people are travelling hours for crisis care? Have your say in the comments below.