Wagga’s new mental health facilities have been described as a “massive improvement” by the state’s chief psychiatrist.
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Dr Murray Wright was in the city on Tuesday on a statewide tour of mental health facilities as part of an investigation into seclusion, restraint and observation practices.
“I have the advantage of having worked here, in the old unit, for a number of years more than a decade ago, so I am very familiar with what services used to be and I’ve also had the opportunity to visit the services here several times,” Dr Wright said.
“It’s a vast improvement, and you don’t have to be an experienced clinician to know that the facilities within which you work can make your job either easier or harder.
“I think it’s certainly a massive improvement.”
The review being undertaken by the team led by Dr Wright was announced in May by NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard after footage emerged of the final days of a patient at Lismore Base Hospital in 2014.
That patient, Miriam Merten, was found to have died from traumatic and hypoxic brain injury caused by numerous falls after she was locked in a seclusion room in a mental health unit. She was naked and chemically restrained.
At each of the locations his team is visiting, Dr Wright is meeting with clinicians, as well as people who use the mental health services and their carers.
“We have already met with the leadership team at the hospital, had a visit at the hospital facilities and met with some clinicians as well. We have also received number of written submissions,” Dr Wright said.
He said the team was not investigating a particular service or incident.
“We’re more interested in our systems of our care and how we can actually improve the care for the future. We’re focused on the future. We want to make our services safer and we want to make the experience for our consumers and their families far more therapeutic,” Dr Wright said.
“Although we are looking at services in quite different settings, including rural and metro services, there are some very common threads. These threads actually are supported by what we’re seeing in the literature and we are hearing about from our colleagues overseas.
“It’s really important that we have the consumer and the carer as port of the solution. They can tell us things that we don’t really understand as clinicians.
“If we want to improve our services, they need to be at the table and advising us how we can improve the services.”
Dr Wright also emphasised the importance of staff.
I think there’s always concerns about whether we’ve got the right staff mix and whether we’ve got the right skills sets,” he said
“What we are hearing is that there is plenty of opportunity to improve our services to make them safer within the current staffing arrangements.”
Asked about the practice of “fly in-fly out” specialists, Dr Wright was supportive of a service which blended these services with those of “local residential clinicians.”