Page 2147 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 5 June 2019
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As a matter of anecdote, I can say I have been pleased to get very positive feedback on these facilities, both from those who needed the services of the unit, the inpatients, and also from staff, who really welcome the new working spaces, and carers, who appreciate their loved ones being in a world-class facility like that.
Mental health is a significant component of the Centenary hospital expansion project. The project will deliver additional maternity beds, more special care beds and neonatology services, a specialised gynaecological procedures room, better integrated maternity services, improved paediatric services, and specifically an adolescent mental health inpatient unit and day service.
Planning and early design work for the adolescent mental health unit is underway and the unit is expected to be completed during the 2021-22 financial year. The specialised adolescent mental health service will be a new addition to our growing mental health system, in recognition of the growing need for these services in the Canberra community. Until now, some people have needed to be sent interstate for these facilities, but soon we will be in a position to provide these services here in the ACT, keeping young people close to home and helping them to stay connected with family and community.
I am pleased with the work that has been done in preparing this new facility in terms of the engagement with clinicians and staff on design features. It would be fair to say that there have been a few iterations of the design as we have worked through this with staff. I am very pleased with that process in the sense that the community can have confidence that the design has been done in a way where the staff who work there feel that we are producing the optimal sort of facility for what is needed for our cohort of patients.
Another important investment was announced in yesterday’s budget, with capital and recurrent funding provided to establish a dedicated electroconvulsive therapy service at the adult mental health unit. Having a dedicated ECT facility at the AMHU will significantly improve access to this evidence-based clinical service for patients, leading to reduced length of stay for inpatients and fewer relapses for people requiring maintenance therapy in the community.
Many of our existing mental health facilities are newer than other parts of our health infrastructure, with AMHU opening in 2012 and Dhulwa opening in 2016. Last year we had an independent external review of our mental health facilities undertaken, and the reviewers noted the high quality of the infrastructure. In their final report, the reviewers said that the ACT’s mental health inpatient facilities “were generally of an excellent standard, with high levels of consumer and staff amenity” and that “the facilities were clean and well maintained”.
Another interesting aspect of infrastructure planning that we encountered through last year’s accreditation process was the evolving nature of standards around mental health infrastructure, particularly ligature minimisation. Despite the adult mental health unit having only opened in 2012 and having been built to the latest ligature safe standards at that time, by 2018 the standard for ligature minimisation in inpatient mental health facilities had changed to reflect the availability of new technology.
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