Docs too busy dealing with mental health crisis to train up young medicos, expert warns

Queensland Health’s top mental health expert has told a parliamentary committee into the fractured system that professionals were so busy dealing with people in crisis it was having a ripple effect across the industry.

DOCTORS are so busy dealing with people in crisis they’re struggling to treat, prevent, train or learn, stopping them from improving the reasons the mental health sector is in crisis in the first place.

Queensland Health’s top mental health expert, Mental Health Alcohol and Other Drugs Branch executive director Associate Professor John Allan, told a parliamentary committee into the fractured mental health system that professionals were so busy it was scaring off young medicos they were trying to train up.

Mental Health Alcohol and Other Drugs Branch executive director Associate Professor John Allan. Picture: AAP/Richard Walker

The committee heard of major workforce issues, including a lack of Commonwealth funding for training in the private sector, and training positions and jobs going begging because no one was applying, with Prof Allan warning “we’re going to be in trouble” if the workforce couldn’t be built up.

“What we need is an investment that allows supervisors to have time to supervise … and we need a time for trainees to train in a safe environment that they’re not completely stressed out by the phone ringing constantly and think this is a terrible career and we don’t want to do it,” Prof Allan said.

The committee – set up by Health Minister Yvette D’Ath after The Courier-Mail exposed the state of the broken system – heard professionals felt unable to take time away from helping patients in immediate crisis to dedicate time treating underlying problems.

“So for example, take the crisis that’s on in our emergency departments, many of those people have a condition called borderline personality disorder,” he said.

“ … What those people need is not to end up in an ED but to end up in therapy and they need to have dialectical behaviour therapy and other versions of that, that could be supplied by those people, we have people trained to do that.

“What we don’t have is space in the system to allow them to stop what they’re doing in the crisis response to actually deliver that training.”

Queensland Mental Health Commissioner Ivan Frkovic warned the “mental health pandemic is still to come”. Picture: Steve Pohlner

He said the system needed to “recognise that people have special skills and we need to use those skills in an appropriate manner”, rather than having people working below their skill level because there was so much work to be done.

QH Chief Allied Health Officer Liza-Jane McBride said there were difficulties attracting nurses to work in mental health because “there is no career progression” and their roles were too limited.

Counsellor, speech pathologists, psychologists, exercise physiologists and physiotherapists, who could assist with behavioural therapy must also be leveraged as a great “untapped workforce for mental health services”, she said.

Despite the pressures, it was still easier to get an appointment in the public system than the overwhelmed private sector, experts said.

Meanwhile, Queensland Mental Health Commissioner Ivan Frkovic warned the “mental health pandemic is still to come” with the impact of Covid increasing and lingering for the next three years, meaning services needed to get ready now.