Service diverting mental health patients from emergency departments shuts down from lack of staff

A mental health home care service set up to ease pressure at the struggling Emergency Departments has been halted due to lack of staff.

A shortage of mental health staff across the state has temporarily shut down a service that’s diverted 120 patients from bottle-necked emergency departments.

In the week following the closure of the Mental Health Hospital in the Home (MHIH) program, 25 mental health patients waited for a bed for 24 hours or more in Royal Adelaide Hospital’s emergency department.

The Advertiser understands 68 per cent of those patients waited 32 hours or more. This is more than double the national average length of stay for people presenting with an acute mental health crisis, the Australian College for Emergency Medicine says.

And there were two patients waiting more than 90 hours for a mental health bed last weekend.

SA Health says the MHIH service stopped on July 30 after several months of operation and will resume once 10 full-time staff are recruited.

The program was set up in November to divert patients from emergency departments (EDs) at the RAH and Queen Elizabeth Hospital in response to surging acute mental health cases during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The program was set up in November to divert patients from emergency departments (EDs) at the RAH and Queen Elizabeth Hospital in response to surging acute mental health cases during the Covid-19 pandemic. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dean Martin

A coalition of peak health bodies has warned that up to 200 extra mental health staff, particularly nurses, were needed to cope with demand and to help reduce ambulance ramping and long ED wait times.

Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation SA Branch chief executive officer Elizabeth Dabars said state Liberal and Labor governments had known for several years of a mental health staff shortage and nothing of substance had been done to fix it.

Associate Professor Dabars said mental health staff were overworked and unable to keep up with extra demand.

“It’s unsustainable,” she said. “And those who suffer are the patients, the entire community, ED staff and mental health staff who can’t do their jobs properly.”

A Central Adelaide Local Health Network spokes­woman said recruitment for the MHIH service was under way but the pandemic made it harder to recruit staff, particularly experienced ­mental health nurses, due to interstate and international border closures.

She said patients using the scheme had transitioned back to their primary mental health services, while other services continued to divert patients away from EDs.

A state government spokeswoman said SA’s mental health system was boosted through a $163.5m package in this year’s state budget, which was designed in response to the impact of Covid-19.

The spokeswoman said this included measures to address staffing issues and $8.4m a year for community mental health services to reduce ED presentations.