Grim sign of times

ON ONE view it is very good news that Barwon Health will get $430,000 ‘security money’ from the State Government to boost security at its sites.

But it is startling that the statewide rollout — aimed at keeping frontline hospital staff safe from violence at work — will include expanding the trial of stab-proof vests and body cameras.

What a terribly sad sign of the times that the virtue industry of healthcare now has to take security precautions that seem better suited to a warzone than a hospital.

Writing on a different topic to the left of this column today, Geelong hospital chief Ruth Salom refers to some of the ‘angels’ who work out of Barwon Health.

We can vouch for this first hand, as can many Addy readers who regularly supply letters thanking a particular Geelong Hospital nurse or health professional for their compassionate attentiveness.

How unfortunate that frontline staff, receptionists, nurses and doctors are now regularly under attack as they try to help people through their health battles.

The ravaging effect of the sinister drug ice is no doubt playing a large part in this senseless violence, as are related extreme mental illness issues such as ice-induced psychosis.

And so funding for panic buttons and CCTV cameras — even stab vests — are generally welcome to lower the day to day dangers faced by health staff. They might work for a rational person behaving badly.

But they won’t deter a deluded ice user from engaging in psychotic violence.

It is time to reconsider the socalled reforms of the 1990s that poured patients out of asylums and on to the street (often into fatal confrontations with police.)

It is time to get serious about confronting spiraling ice and drug-induced mental trauma in our community.

Our leaders need to grapple with these larger, harder issues.

While they refuse to do so, funding for hospital CCTV cameras and the like will simply be the policy equivalent of a band-aid on a gaping wound.