MENTAL HEALTH EMERGENCY “TREATMENT BY POSTCODE"

A leaked memo has revealed that mental health patients are being transported from hospital to hospital and forced to wait in emergency departments for days for treatment, because of a new Health Department directive.

Mental health patients who present to the Royal Adelaide Hospital are to be told to go back to their nearest local hospitals and wait for treatment, according to a Liberal Party media release.

The Liberals claim that because there are no specialist mental health staff after-hours and no beds available, patients lingered in the emergency departments – with at least one patient waiting four days in an emergency department.

The leaked memo from the Central Northern Adelaide Health Service tells staff that a “repatriation protocol has been implemented due to the cessation of the Hospital Support Team at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in late August 2005”. It says that the“Repatriation is the transfer of out of area Mental Health presentations requiring admission back to their local area hospital”.

All patients – except those from the eastern suburbs (within the RAH’s local intake area) and country areas – are transported to their local hospital for treatment.

The Director of Emergency Medicine at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Dr Kenneth Ooi, has written a scathing letter stating the new procedure has caused “unnecessary stress, discomfort and disruption to vulnerable patients”.

Liberal health spokesman Dean Brown said the debacle was further evidence of the mental health crisis that had developed under the Rann Government. “This is mental health treatment by postcode,” he said.

“These mental health patients have been shipped around from one emergency department to another like cattle in trucks. Some of the emergency departments they are being sent to have no mental health staff on duty and no mental health report is being sent from the RAH to detail their conditions." said Mr Brown. “This debacle shows the depths of the crisis in mental health."

In his letter to the General Manager of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Dr Ooi details three appalling examples of mental health patients taken from the RAH to the QEH.

They include:

* A patient who arrived “without escort and without further working” who remained in the emergency department for four days;

* Another patient who was detained and arrived with a police escort, however there was no transfer letter and no mental health report highlighting her condition; and

* A third patient who had no transfer letter and no mental health report.

The letter states:

“…The patients went from a department where there is a psychiatry registrar 24 hours/day, a short stay unit and showers, to a department where there is none of these.”

“If the aim of this process is to improve the care given to Mental Health patients then I do not see how that is served by shuttling them between EDs [Emergency Departments], especially to one with fewer facilities.

Dr Ooi points out that: “The patients arrived between 22.00 and 23.00 on a Friday night with no plan of management when there is no psychiatric cover at TQEH. While the patients may have had specialty assessment by a Mental Health worker at the RAH, this was not clearly documented and they were transferred to a facility where they would not see the Mental Health team for til the next day”.

Media release here