Mental health care cracking as blind eye turned to failed patients
‘ITHINK it’s frostbite!’ The doctor looked worryingly at the red stubs of my fingertips. My mind instantly flashed back to that cycling trip I did a few weeks back. ‘Could that have been it? If so can I cycle again?’ I thought. ‘You’ll be grand. Just get a blood test. You’ve ten minutes to get the sample to the hospital. Get on your bike!’
Not one to go to the doctor too often, I was only there on the strong urging of the ex, who, out of concern urged me to attend CareDoc two nights previously.
I rang CareDoc but couldn’t get through. I tried again a half hour later and finally got through to a nurse in Carlow who seemed very stressed and possibly after several strong coffees. This was midnight at the jagged, frayed end of a very busy work week and I could barely keep up with the plan she was laying out. ‘ There is noone in CareDoc tonight. Call before 6 and we’ll schedule an appointment for 9,’ I was told.
I woke, by sheer luck, at 5.57 a.m. and called getting an appointment for 9.10 a.m. I was seen by a very overworked doctor, who was recovering from a 14 hour shift the previous day. Two days later I spent over two hours in a doctor’s surgery waiting to be seen. It was a work day so I, (being of the old school, non-Snowflake generation), was stressed about not being at my desk at work. The doctor I saw looked like he had worked a full week and it was only Tuesday late morning. I dropped the bloods off, in a panic, just in time.
The underlying message is that our doctors are overworked and stressed. It is a message cried and shouted out from Prime Time programmes and newspaper pages every week, as scandal after scandal engulfs our hospitals.
Last week psychiatric nurses at Psychi- atry Departments at University Hospital Waterford joined their St Luke’s Hospital colleagues by beginning industrial action because of the pressure they are under working in overcrowded, understaffed wards. The nurses in Waterford voted to no longer co-operate with non-nursing duties. GPs, also have a head spinning amount of ‘non-doctor’ responsibilities and duties to contend with.
PNA Industrial Relations Officer, Michael Hayes, said nurses were embarking on industrial action reluctantly, but have been left with no choice. He said: ‘The message to the HSE from today is clear – the current levels of overcrowding in psychiatric units in Waterford and Kilkenny cannot be allowed to continue. These vital services cannot be delivered adequately and safely in facilities that are regularly overcrowded and understaffed.’
I attended a meeting in 2006 about A Vision for Change, a framework for building and fostering positive mental health across the country and for providing accessible, community-based, specialist services for people with mental illness. A report released last week highlighted how the country’s youth mental health services are running on just over half their recommended number of staff. This comes just days after a report from the Children’s Rights Alliance revealed that nearly 7,000 children under the age of 17 were waiting for a community-based psychology appointment at the end of last July — with one third of those waiting for more than a year. Health Minister Simon Harris and the HSE are struggling to fill hundreds of positions for mental health nurses and consultant psychiatrists up and down the country. Would you blame them with so few 24/7 faciltiies and resources?