The Government pledged $1.9billion towards a range of mental health initiatives in this year's Budget, and Dr Clark was speaking at the second of a series of nationwide roadshows designed to discuss with practitioners and providers the most effective ways of spending that money.
"The workforce can be trained, or retrained, or recruited, and internal processes can be shifted," Dr Clark said.
"He Ara Oranga (the inquiry into mental health and addiction services) has given us a clear mandate for change."
Dr Clark told the meeting the new funding gave a tremendous opportunity to transform lives and help New Zealanders dealing with mental illness or distress.
Earlier, Dr Clark told the Otago Daily Times it would be a challenge to find enough mental health workers to meet the Government's target, that every New Zealander suffering mild to moderate mental illness be able to be treated for free.
"We need to grow the workforce, and we estimate we will need around 1600 more frontline workers in five years' time to deliver care to up to 325,000 New Zealanders.
"We think around three-quarters of those people will have existing health qualifications; they might be nurses, social workers, occupational therapists, and they might do a training course to get an appropriate further qualification for this role."
Those people would then be supervised by a psychologist or psychotherapist, who would give appropriate follow-up training.
"At first instance we want to build on what is already here and scale up what is already successful," Dr Clark said.
"There is a tension between people who say let's get on with it as soon as possible and those with experience in the sector who say we need to make sure we design these things properly first, listening to those people who they are going to serve."
Many of those services would be based in primary care or community settings, but the Government has also set aside money for capital work on existing mental health hospitals, Dr Clark said.
"We put another $200million specifically in this Budget for mental health and addiction facility rebuilds, because as I have travelled around the country I recognise a lot of them are not contemporary buildings or the therapeutic environments you might expect, and I salute the staff who work in them.
"We won't fix them overnight, but we have an ambition to rebuild services that provide that specialist care."
