Page 1265 - Week 05 - Thursday, 4 June 2020
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unrelenting pressure of having high demands of patients. Problems are due to a lack of resources and the way the system operates.
On this latter score, the ACT’s mental health system is so complex and unnavigable that some patients, and families of patients, simply give up and go interstate for treatment. Mr Rattenbury keeps talking about making the system less complex. Indeed, in an answer to a question on notice about this, Mr Rattenbury went to considerable lengths to try and convince me that he was working on it. I have to say, given the answer, that I am not surprised that patients and their families find the ACT’s mental health system so unnavigable. Even Mr Rattenbury’s answer to my question was pretty much unnavigable.
In May this year, the deputy New South Wales coroner, Harriet Grahame, delivered a report into the 2018 death of an Indigenous man, Jonathon Hogan, in a Junee prison. Coroner Grahame did not have jurisdiction to examine Mr Hogan’s dealings with the ACT mental health system or justice system. Mr Hogan was taken to the Canberra Hospital mental health unit in July 2017 for assessment after self-harming in custody. He escaped from the Canberra Hospital and fled to New South Wales, where he was jailed and ultimately died.
Early last year, Mr Hogan’s father, Matthew, wrote to several ministers, including Mr Rattenbury, asking for an inquiry. On 4 April 2018, Mr Hogan was quoted in the Canberra Times as follows:
My purpose in writing … is to ask you to institute an independent inquiry within the portfolio areas of the ACT for which you are responsible. I ask this in the hope that the tragic fate suffered by my son will not be repeated.
The letter quoted continues:
These issues go to the nature, quality and effectiveness of services in the ACT … Not just for people such as my son who are in touch with the criminal justice system, but to people with multiple issues such as those with which Jonathon lived, including major mental health problems, a history of self-harm and extremely problematic alcohol and drug use.
A spokesman for the ACT government said that an inquiry would be held. If the ACT government has held this inquiry, as Mr Hogan asked for, the results have not been made available publicly.
This is one of the many issues that my call today for the Human Rights Commission to investigate could cover. The ACT Human Rights Commission has previously found that there is a revolving door in our mental health system.
The Productivity Commission RoGS found that, in 2017-18, 10 per cent of acute mental health patients were discharged feeling significantly worse than when they entered the system; 49 per cent of patients who were discharged from acute mental health services in the ACT felt that they had not improved. There is a significant increase in the number of patients who return in less than 28 days to the ACT’s mental health system. These figures show a consistent failing in the mental health
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