HSE mental health centres unable to provide therapy due to staffing issues

Kenneth Fox

Mental health centres around the country are having to offer beds and medication only to distressed, extremely vulnerable patients due to chronic understaffing levels.

The Irish Examiner reports that those impacted include people potentially experiencing severe depression, psychosis, mania, suicidal distress, or extreme anxiety.

Multiple approved centres currently only have nursing and psychiatric staff available to care for vulnerable patients, with essential multidisciplinary services such as psychology, occupational therapy, and social work either vacant or facing recruitment issues.

The issue is particularly acute in the Midlands, where no psychologist, occupational therapist, or social worker has ever been assigned to any of the region’s three centres.

Approved mental health centres are registered psychiatric in-patient units or hospitals.

There are roughly 60 of them nationwide, with upwards of 2,000 patients resident at any one time, plus a further 50 in child mental health services and close to 16,000 admissions a year.

The median length of stay for an in-patient in these centres is just over three months.

The Mental Health Commission's code of practice for approved centres says multi-disciplinary teams at each centre should include psychiatry, nursing, social work, clinical psychology and occupational therapy.

Psychology, social care, and occupational therapy each provide therapeutics for different facets of need for each patient — from assessing difficulties or trauma, to negotiating family housing and welfare challenges, to delivering the practical skills for a patient to leave a centre safely.

Cork East TD Liam Quaide, a clinical psychologist who received the information on staffing from the HSE via parliamentary question, said: “An in-patient mental health setting should not be reduced to beds, medication, and observation.”

He said people admitted to such units “are often at one of the lowest and most frightening points in their lives”. Mr Quaide said.