Page 4145 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 15 November 2005
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way?” As someone close to me said the other day, “There is something wrong in this town when you ring the mental health crisis team on behalf of someone who is suicidal and you get put on hold for 20 minutes.” The experience I have had is that there is something fundamentally wrong. There is something fundamentally wrong when you go with this person to the hospital and it takes you three or four hours to be seen satisfactorily when someone is in crisis.
This person is lucky because he has a family and a circle of friends who are there to do those things. I suspect there are many people outside my experience who do not have that support base and who are just crying in the wilderness because there is no-one to help them negotiate the minefield of mental health bureaucracy in this town.
This is often a great complaint with all health services. The health services are highly expensive and we want to make sure that the most deserving people get them; so we have a whole lot of obstacles to stop people needlessly accessing them. But they become so difficult that the people who need the assistance often miss out because they don’t have the wit, the wherewithal or the sheer energy to negotiate the system. When we get to the acute phase, there are many people who have been failed by the system because a simple cry for help is not enough.
The minister has spent a lot of time talking about the projects that they are going to do, the things that they are going to do. They are going to build a new PSU; they are going to design a policy to minimise violence in acute settings; they are going to do a whole lot of things. We are going to have a program for marrying the health and mental health requirements of people who are clients of the mental health service. All of these things are good but we need to see them happen.
First and foremost, what we need to see is some simple coordination and case management of the people who are in the system. Case management, in the personal experiences I have had, is non-existent. There are occasions when people have been told, “Yes, you should be case-managed.” As Mr Smyth said, with roughly 40 to 50 clients per person in the mental health system, there is no scope for case management; we cannot have case management of people who need it because there are too many people being spread too thinly.
It is not appropriate, in a premier city in the First World; we should not be here on a regular basis discussing these problems that, under the tutelage of this minister over 3½ years, have seen little to no improvement. This is a disgrace; this is a shame for this whole territory. It is a shame for this minister and this government that, when people stand here on a regular basis and speak of these issues, we are told, “We have doubled the money; we are gunna throw more money at it; we are gunna come up with policies; we are gunna build a new infrastructure.” There seems to be very little in terms of the day-to-day holding of the hand, the case management of people, the putting together of the resources in the best possible way.
In the case of our young friend, there is an awful lot of money being spent around the periphery and if somebody spent some time thinking about the best way to do it, he would get a better outcome and so would the territory.
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