Page 3653 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 28 October 2014
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community are pleased that we are finally here debating this legislation, including the public servants in the chamber today who spent so much time on what must now seem like their magnum opus—and it is good that we are here debating it today—the question remains: why has it taken so long?
Despite the length of the consultation, the bill as we see it today is not without its flaws. Seven years of consultation has not yet remedied the lack of information carers receive. Seven years of consultation did not save the government the embarrassment of a complete backflip on the engagement of ambulance paramedics as law enforcement staff. Seven years consultation has not changed the lack of staff in the mental health area, particularly at the adult mental health unit. Despite all these years of consultation there are still significant cultural problems in the field in ways which are not as stark as in the mainstream health system.
Why have the needs of carers and families not been taken fully into account in these very significant legislative changes? The answer I have received is that the Privacy Act and the Human Rights Act impede change, whereas, in fact, the explanatory statement to the bill says that the service a person receives can only be safe and of high quality if they are appropriately shaped by the person’s relevant attributes. I wonder how the system is meant to understand and fully interplay with a person’s relevant attributes if carers are not intricately involved in the information going to and fro about the client. It is interesting that clients in other areas of health seem to get more information about their loved ones. There is slow and careful planning for release into the community from other sectors of government where the needs of the client, upon re-entry into the community, are taken fully into account.
But when a mother in her 70s wants to make sure that her daughter is not fed broccoli in the adult mental health unit because she is allergic to it and she is waved away from the AMHU and when a mother of three schizophrenic sons tries to tell emergency staff that her son is agitated but in no way violent, the police are called in to arrest him and take him the 20 metres from the roundabout outside the emergency to the back entrance to the emergency department so that later that night it can say, on the paperwork, that he was arrested and brought in by the police, in order to trip the medical system’s ability to issue a three-day order to incarcerate him or to involuntarily detain him in the AMHU, this government hides behind a twisted view of human rights in these situations, keeping carers out of the information loop. After these clients have left the system carers have to pick up the pieces at home.
This is in stark contrast to our mainstream medical system which treats family and carers as the bedrock of future care. An example of this was a young man who was suffering mental health issues whose family was denied information regarding his treatment plan, including medication requirements, causing no end of frustration for the family as they were not able to be actively involved in the healing process completely. However, when the same young man was diagnosed with cancer the medical system was very open and collaborative. Medical staff were happy to share what treatment plans would be, what the medication would be and how the family could help the young man in what he was facing.
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