Page 2326 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 16 September 1992
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It would offer them the chance to see other people of their own age in similar circumstances. It would allow them the opportunity to form the sorts of bonds that help them accept injuries and illnesses, with their consequential effects on their lives.
The Camperdown adolescent unit staff feel that the unit has been of great benefit to the young people who have been hospitalised there, and that it has increased their success rate for treatment by lifting the spirits of the adolescents it cares for. The staff are confident that the peer group plays a large part in this process, particularly for those young people who have life-long illnesses or disfiguring diseases. There have been other benefits, as the unit has become a referral centre for other hospitals that treat adolescents in normal adult wards. The Camperdown Children's Hospital finds itself being approached to take on young patients because their illnesses are not responding to treatment, while the major cause is suspected to be depression. While not claiming any miracle cures, the staff feel that the peer group atmosphere created in the unit helps overcome many of the problems associated with depression.
The Camperdown unit has served as a model for hospitals internationally, through its association with the United Nations, and could serve as a good model for Canberra. The unit provides educational facilities, in recognition of the fact that when young people get behind in school studies this can cause other consequential problems in their lives. The Cellblock provides outpatient clinics and medical services for those young people who do not need hospitalisation, and includes antenatal and postnatal classes for adolescent mothers. Counselling services are provided for young patients and their families, as well as a creative arts function to give a focus to the group ethos of the unit, health promotion sessions and an outreach service for adolescents with special needs. All these initiatives have been developed in recognition of the needs of young people in the health system.
Before members start considering the cost of establishing an adolescent unit of this scale, it needs to be remembered that these facilities are the result of 15 years of building on the original concept. In the ACT I feel that it is important to take the first step now, and then to let the adolescent ward start its own agenda to develop additional services. If we do not take this first step, and take it soon, we will have lost another window of opportunity - to establish the unit as part of the hospital redevelopment program.
The ACT Council of Social Service, in its submission to the ACT Government on the budget recently, called for an adolescent psychiatric service. It cites the successful recent opening of the adolescent day care centre for young, emotionally distressed children as a step forward, but says that there still exists a need for a coordinated approach by educationalists and psychiatric services to help young people in crisis. While ACTCOSS has stopped short of calling for an adolescent ward, there is a need to recognise that many psychiatric illnesses have their onset in adolescence and that treating this particular group along with older patients is inappropriate.
In the 1980 paper by the Australian College of Paediatrics, which I referred to earlier, there were many reasons put forward in support of adolescent wards. In short, these were: Firstly, adolescents are neither children nor adults, physically, emotionally or socially. Secondly, children's hospitals are not
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