Banksia campaigner Di Wyatt 'angry and disgusted' at lack of children's services

Hopes were high that a new three-bed "unit" announced a fortnight ago could mean the city could get a new child and adolescent psychiatrist and other youth specialist services to fill what Mrs Wyatt has repeatedly said is a huge healthcare gap.

Mr Anderson joined JobLink CEO Christine Shewry to announce the business would make a $1.5 million to the new "adolescent unit".

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Hunter New England Executive Director of Mental Health, Brendan Flynn clarified last week that the new element is not a "unit", will not have additional child specialist staff, and will contain just two beds, neither of them new ones. He described the new section as a "pod".

Mrs Wyatt said the city was desperately short of youth specialist mental health care.

She said the coronavirus crisis will increase the number of young people who need mental health care.

And in an interview this week she revealed the shortage is already costing lives.

"What happened last year has affected a lot of young people. What I'm hearing is that there are more and more children having more health problems and they can't get the help," she said.

"I only spoke to a lady yesterday and her son took his life last year. She'd been trying to get him help since he was 7 and he died just before his 18th birthday and she couldn't get the help for him. And that was last year.

"Things aren't getting better. She couldn't get a diagnosis because he wasn't 18 yet, so he couldn't get the proper care he needed."

Her own granddaughter cannot get a specialist, which means she cannot be prescribed some treatments she needs, she said.

"There's a lot of people out there that need the help. You have to go out of town because you can't get one here or you've got to do it on Skype. That's not good enough. Because they have to see a whole person, they can't just see from waist up. The whole body language tells the story. It's got to be face-to-face.

"They're our future, they're the future of the country. If we don't look after our kids who's going to?"

In an exclusive interview this week Dr Flynn told the Leader the health district had deployed a visiting child psychiatrist to the city at the start of the pandemic, a resource the region had never had before. The doctor works a day or two a fortnight, he said.

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Asked if Hunter New England could have done more to get a psychiatrist in the region full-time he said mental health care was everyone's responsibility.

"When we have a community in distress and I think it's fair to say that what we've seen in child and adolescent mental health presentations across Australia, since last March, that is a responsibility of the local health district, which does specialise in mental health care, but is also the responsibility of many other key players," he said.

"It's an issue for general practice, issue for the federal government in terms of the best way to support communities through Medicare rebate services. It's an issue for schools. It's an issue for psychology and private psychiatrists. As a community of mental health clinicians there are really active discussions going on, about how all of our services can best address this need."

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He said the service had not been able to attract a resident psychiatrist to Tamworth in many years, a problem that is common across rural healthcare.

"If any of your readers know of someone who's interested in moving to the county I would be very happy," he said.

"Describing that as a practical option that we haven't looked at is not accurate. We've tried numerous times."

The new "pod" will house mentally ill children and other vulnerable people for as long as 72 hours, in a segregated section of the new Mental Health Unit away from other patients.

One benefit is that it will save children a pointless journey down to the Nexus unit in the John Hunter Hospital in the first throes of a mental health crisis, which might quickly subside and lead to them being discharged in Newcastle.

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New statistics released by the Bureau of Health Information this week show Tamworth hospital's mental health services are in more demand than ever. Beds were occupied for 2,905 days from October to December 2020, up from 2,557 bed days the year before, despite a reduction in "episodes" from 240 to 225, because patients had a longer average length of stay.

Tamworth's new mental health unit will include no new general purpose beds or children's beds. All eight new beds will provide specialist healthcare for seniors.

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