Mentally Ill Patients Discharged in to Hostels

[Guest The Pom Queen]

Mentally ill patients are being moved to backpacker hostels to free up hospital beds.

HOSPITALS and other health services in Perth are increasingly discharging mental health patients ‘too early’ and dumping them in backpacker hostels to free up beds.

 

Mental health professionals and advocates said the practice was a stopgap measure, blaming the Barnett Government for not providing enough community-based “step-down” facilities.

 

Chief mental health advocate Debora Colvin said there was evidence to support previous anecdotal claims that people were being shunted to “inappropriate” places such as backpackers.

 

“There used to be a time when they wouldn’t release people from hospital unless they had a decent place to go, but that has changed,” she said.

 

“There is enormous pressure to discharge patients because of other very unwell people held up in emergency departments waiting for a bed.”

 

Maxine Drake, another advocate, was “moved to tears” by the “shameful way” a 22-year-old woman was recently moved from Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital to a hostel in the CBD.

 

 

“There’s almost a moral bankruptcy in the mental health service if they would even suggest a backpacker hostel for somebody like this young woman,” Ms Drake said.

 

Industry sources said patients were being discharged “too early” and placed in hostels or short-term boarding homes. Health officials regarded it as the “new norm”, a source said.

 

“Backpacker facilities are inappropriate and unable to provide the level and type of support that individuals and families needed to be safe and recover from mental illness,” Richmond Wellbeing acting chief executive Adrian Munro said.

 

Health Consumers’ Council WA executive director Pip Brennan said the State Government needed to look at more innovative and collaborative measures to support patients.

 

WA only has one step-down facility, a 22-bed site in Joondalup. A contract for a 10-bed site in Rockingham is under tender.

 

Other facilities earmarked by the Government are in doubt after revelations by The Sunday Times this month of $21.6 million to be cut from the Mental Health Commission budget.

 

A Mental Health Commission spokeswoman said the proposed facilities were all “subject to normal budgetary and Government approval processes”.

 

Opposition mental health spokesman Stephen Dawson said it was “no wonder we have this revolving door” of mental patients repeatedly getting sick.

 

A Department of Health spokesman said there were “no formal arrangements with backpacker hostels to accommodate discharged patients”.