Patients are waiting nearly four days in emergency departments for dedicated mental health beds and are increasingly being treated in general wards, in developments psychiatrists have labelled as frightening. or signup to continue reading The resignation of 55 NSW public-sector psychiatrists - part of a cohort of more than 200 who previously signalled plans to quit - has exacerbated already stretched services in the nation's largest health system. At least 28 specialist hospital beds have been closed in recent weeks amid the doctors' push for a significant pay rise, as well as improvements in mental health services.
Wait times for the emergency department at Westmead Hospital, in Sydney's west, showed a patient with chronic schizophrenia waiting 88 hours for a bed on Tuesday, while another patient with suicidal plans had waited 86 hours. NSW Mental Health Minister Rose Jackson conceded those conditions were "not anything new" for a system already with a third of specialist psychiatric positions vacant before the mass resignations. But UNSW associate professor Chris Ryan, who is a working psychiatrist, said patients with significant mental health problems were being given beds in general wards that lacked appropriately specialised staff and suitable conditions.
"They're being admitted under general physicians, not psychiatrists - endocrinologists and drug and alcohol physicians and neurologists, and I've got to say, in some ways that's an even more frightening prospect," he to.