THE HEALTH Service Executive is to bring forward a new three-year plan to speed up the implementation of its mental health strategy, the Minister of State for Mental Health has said.
Kathleen Lynch told the National Mental Healthcare Conference in Dublin yesterday the rate of implementation of the strategy, A Vision for Change, had been “far too slow”. She said she had asked the HSE to prepare an implementation plan to identify specific recommendations of the strategy to be progressed over the next three years.
A Vision for Change was published in 2006. It promised to modernise antiquated mental health services in Ireland, including establishing 99 community teams across the Republic.
Progress has been slow and an independent monitoring group reported in July that specialist services promised as part of the strategy had not been developed. These included forensic mental healthcare services, rehabilitation and recovery, eating disorder services, psychiatric services for older people, services for co-morbid severe mental illness and substance abuse problems and intellectual disability services.
Ms Lynch said the Government was committed to the implementation of the strategy.
“During my period in office I want to see the remaining old psychiatric institutions closed and patients relocated to more appropriate settings,” she said.
The new implementation plan would identify timelines, detailed costs, and the persons responsible for implementation, she added.
Speakers at yesterday’s conference included Mary Morrissey of the Psychological Society of Ireland; campaigner for the homeless Fr Peter McVerry and Michele Kerrigan, chief executive of Grow.
Dr Ian Gargan, of Imagine Health, a private mental healthcare provider, said there had to be innovative use of existing resources.
He also advocated for the use of a modern secure platform so that social workers and health practitioners could log into patients files and access their data easily.
This would also allow a governing body to look over the shoulder of practitioners to ensure patients were getting adequate treatment. Ireland also needed a mental health outcome measurement system.
“We have no measure of whether mental health is effective in this country,” Dr Gargan said.
