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 Home News Mental Health
Psychiatric nurses and health professionals working in mental health stop work12 October 2007Psychiatric nurses and health professionals working in mental health in the Geelong/Barwon region will stop work today for 4 hours to protest and address a series of mental health service failures in the region “Mental health services in the Barwon Region have been deteriorating and reached a crisis point following a series of serious injuries to staff and ongoing service failures,” Victorian #2 Branch and HACSU State Secretary, Lloyd Williams said. "We have had a staff members seriously injured, another who had hot water poured over her, and staff receiving threats to kill." "Our members are now routinely put in high risk situations and are being injured because they cannot provide the level of service and treatments clients need." "People working in mental health in the Barwon Region are now working in some of Victoria's most high risk working environments." "The primary reason is a lack of funding for the services, leading to short staffing and unsustainable workloads." Psychiatric Nurses and Health Professionals are now campaigning to address these issues in their enterprise bargaining process with the Victorian Government and Health Services. A key feature of their campaign is safe and manageable workloads that allow mental health staff to meet client needs. "We cannot attract and retain staff in Mental Health. The State government must address the staffing and workload issues, provide increased funding to services and reward staff properly in order to deal with workforce and service issues" In a recent State-wide survey of over 250 psychiatric nurses and health professionals carried out by HACSU, sixty two percent of clinicians reported having been assaulted in the last 12 months, with most reporting assaults as a regular occurrence at work. Eighty seven percent of those assaulted sustained injuries. In the Barwon Region 60% of staff have been assaulted at work in the last 12 months and 76% of staff say staff shortages are leading to restrictive treatments for clients. Government figures obtained by HACSU show Barwon Mental Health Services have a 13% readmission rate, and one of the lowest lengths of stays in Victoria of only 8.3 days, as clients are bundled out the revolving door to make way for needier clients. Geelong Hospital's 'Swanston Acute Unit' is operating at 101% occupancy level. The unit is constantly full, with people discharged while still very unwell to make way for others at risk in the community. "Patients on community treatment orders, who are receiving involuntarily treatment and released on condition of complying with taking their prescribed medication, often have to be readmitted because they are getting extremely unwell. They are then forced to wait for hours because of bed shortages. Their families take the brunt of the situation." "There are lengthy waiting times in emergency departments for psychiatric beds, sometimes up to 24 hours, leading to patients leaving before they get to the psychiatric acute unit." "In Geelong, there was a recent incident where an autistic boy was admitted to an adult psychiatric unit because there is no specialist child and adolescent beds down there." "These are all service failures brought about by under-funding, staff shortages in inpatient services and the unsustainably high number of people community psychiatric nurses and health professionals are expected to treat and support in the community." "Almost nine out of ten mental health clinicians are now working in facilities with staff shortages, five out of ten on a weekly basis," Lloyd Williams said. For more information about the stop work meeting, visit the Victorian #2 Branch's website. |
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© 2003 Health Services Union (HSU) |
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