New mental health service arrives on Fraser Coast

A new mental health service is coming to the Fraser Coast that will allow people to be treated in their own homes.

The Fraser Coast's mental health response team, including Jaime Horwarth, Cindy Ramos, Fiona Meredith, Rebecca Dodds, Spring Thacker, Leanne Fowler, Melissa Shuttlewood, Paul Fitzpatrick, Nicholas Patterson.

As 000 calls flood in from those experiencing a mental health crisis on the Fraser Coast, a new initiative is being unrolled to treat people in their own homes.

Queensland Ambulance Service mental health response program director Sandra Garner said the initiative would also free up services up for other life-threatening emergencies.

Paramedics are called out to mental health emergencies at a rate of one every 10 minutes, with internal QAS documents revealing a staggering increase over five years.

Ms Garner said in 2019 it was noted that QAS was seeing mental health jobs come in rapidly through emergency calls from people suffering emotional distress.

This month, a new service has been introduced on the Fraser Coast, which will see a mental health clinician go and visit people in their own homes in response to triple-0 calls from people suffering a mental health crisis.

Ms Garner said the new resource would also free up resources in the region’s emergency departments.

Commencing this week, Ms Garner said the response would operate seven days a week, but it was still a limited resource and the presence of a mental health clinician would not be guaranteed.

She said often people did not need to go to hospital, but they did need an urgent assessment.

Data contained within QAS weekly briefing documents, obtained by the Opposition through right to information, shows the number of code 1 and code 2 call-outs for “psychiatric, abnormal behaviour, suicide attempt” cases had increased about 60 per cent over the past five years across the state.

Between July and the end of September, paramedics were assigned to about 156 urgent mental health cases a day, or about one every 10 minutes. ­