ESCAPES ARE GRIM NEWS
GOLD Coast people have a right to be outraged when they learn more than 50 dangerous patients have escaped from mental health units over eight months.
In a city that has had more than its fair share of horrific domestic violence murders, rapes, ice episodes, bashings and robberies, the revelation – finally – that involuntary patients have been able to slip away and commit crimes will not sit well.
There are sneaky aspects to this. The Government has released the Chief Psychiatrist’s annual report late on a Friday with many other reports. That increases the chances of it being overlooked.
Added to that potential for secrecy is the switch of police radios from analogue to digital, designed to foil criminals but also boosting the chances of the media not hearing about escaped patients. The irony now is that police officers are complaining about the number of escapes and have gone public to warn of risks.
Putting the radio issue to one side, the Bulletin agrees it is an unacceptable situation. The numbers of beds in mental heath units must be increased, as must the number of trained medical staff and security officers in our hospitals.
If our other report today of mental health patients wandering off from Robina Hospital to smoke ice in culverts near a school seems familiar, that’s because it is.
That too is unacceptable – and all the more so considering the furore in 2015 when the Bulletin first reported patients were sneaking out of Gold Coast hospitals to score drugs, including Robina where the mental health ward is just across the road from the high school.
Health officials at the time chose to shoot the messenger, blowing up about “negative media’’. We responded by urging the Health Minister and bureaucrats to resolve matters in mental health, warning: “They cannot afford to sit tight and hope problems go away by themselves.’’
The problem now for the Government is that with an election just around the corner, this matter is going to be a hot Gold Coast issue. With the safety of nurses under a cloud and claims that the hierarchy has covered up incidents in which staff were injured, and with the security of schoolchildren at risk, this really should have been dealt with long ago.