Page 2839 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 14 August 2018
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As I said before, the minister has been telling us that emergency surgery waiting times are heading in the right direction. She has consistently said that, and I think that we have now seen that the figures in the budget put the lie to those assertions.
I am very concerned also about the issues of mental health. We have seen—and the minister answered questions in the last sitting period—the extreme risks identified in the adult mental health unit regarding ligature points. And I am very concerned at the slow process that is underway to finally remove all those ligature points. As of 1 August there were still a number of points that had not been addressed and the process for that is languishing.
I am also concerned about the accreditation review done by the Victorian mental health unit into the residential mental health units in the ACT which flagged a number of issues in relation to culture and training and the lack of appropriately trained staff and how we might go about addressing some of those issues. But the most concerning thing was the revelation that there is a nine per cent cut over two years in mental health funding.
We know that the mental health unit is running at 105 per cent capacity and that there are few or no full-time permanent psychiatrists working in the adult mental health unit. There was a period when there were no permanently appointed psychiatrists, and I think the last answer to a question on notice from April was that there is one out of 4½ FTEs. The rest of those are locums. I think that there is a willingness on behalf of visiting medical officers to assist with this crisis, but I understand from the Visiting Medical Officers Association that ACT Health does not want to talk to them about shortages at the adult mental health unit.
I am concerned also about the assaults on staff. It was reported recently that there had been over 10 assaults on staff at Dhulwa over the past few weeks. I am also concerned about the capacity of the office for mental health to really make a difference. There is $782,000 set aside in this budget for the office for mental health, which really will cover the cost of a few staff. In fact, if you look at it, the $785,000 is probably less than the staffing allocation given to Greens members in this place. It will not address the issues significantly, and I do not think that it has the capacity to address all the concerns of the people in the mental health unit. And I have substantial concerns about the way the mental health unit operates, the way that mental health communicates with its clients and people close to its clients.
I find the number of occasions on which I make representations, or have representations made to me by people who are carers of people with mental health issues and who are tearing their hair out because they cannot get even basic information out of the mental health services, is rising. I think it is ironic that if I turned up at hospital with one of my adult children who had a broken bone, hospital staff would willingly talk to me about what is wrong and the modality of treatment. But if I turned up in the same place with an adult child with mental health issues, immediately the shutters go up, they cannot talk to the parents or the carers about their treatment and they claim privacy.
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