RHUN AP IORWERTH

COLUMNIST

I WAS recently privileged to meet a young woman who is an active campaigner for mental health provision and to discuss with her the serious challenges we face with service provision.

I find the current weaknesses of the services deeply worrying.

There is consensus that mental health services need strengthening but somehow the response from the Welsh Government is achingly slow.

I know that there is a similar picture right across Wales and there are recurrent problems of a lack of beds, a shortage of staff and long waiting lists.

The latest set of figures show that the waiting times for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) haven’t improved.

More than 20% of children and young people are waiting more than 26 weeks for treatment – a figure that is simply unacceptable.

The situation on Anglesey appears to have reached crisis point, with no consultant psychiatrists for 18 to 65-year-olds working on the island at all.

Mental health teams feel overstretched and know that they are being forced to take risks with patients.

I have learned of many instances where patients, including children, have been sent many miles from home for treatment because of a lack of beds.

While I welcome any signs of improving performance over recent years, progress is clearly far too slow.

Mental health services are significantly underfunded and the issue has long been under-represented in political discourse.

This has of course been exasperated by the Conservative government’s austerity agenda and while Plaid Cymru continues to fight against these arbitrary cuts there are some positive, incremental steps that we can take which can be taken by the Welsh Government now.

We need to ensure that mental health and physical health are treated equally, and to ensure that every area across Wales has reasonable, local access to beds so that we no longer see so many patients forced to travel outside of their areas for treatment, or worse, held in a police cell.

We also need to fund additional research into therapeutic models of treatment so that we have less of a “one size fits all” approach to care.

And most importantly, we need to bring down waiting times for CAMHS patients so that children and young people have timely access to care.

Patients with mental health problems and their families often face a terrible situation, but my sympathies also lie with the staff that are often stretched to the limit as they try to provide patients with the care they need.

Their job is a difficult one already and it is made even worse by the unnecessary challenges placed upon them.

It’s time for the Welsh Government to acknowledge that much more can, and should, be done and for it to take action as a matter of urgency for the sake of staff, patients, and our communities.

Rhun Ap Iorwerth is the Plaid Cymru Shadow Health Secretary