Madam, – Dr Katherine Brown (January 4th) should be grateful that only 25 per cent of acute beds have been cut in Laois/Offaly.
Here in Co Wexford, we will be entirely without an acute admissions unit when St Senan’s Hospital closes in February, effectively removing about 40 beds from the system. A 2007 promise from government to establish an acute unit at Wexford General Hospital has been broken. After February, acutely ill, usually suicidal, service users will have to travel up to 50 miles to the psychiatric unit at Waterford Regional Hospital. Their prospects for admission will not be good given that no extra beds are being provided to cater for the new influx from Co Wexford. Indeed, a consultant at St Senan’s has confided to certain patients that they are unlikely to be admitted.
Far from moving forward with A Vision For Change, our community mental health services are regressing. Therapeutic programmes have been cut, including a CBT group in Wexford town, Community psychiatric nurses have been asked by the HSE to make fewer calls to isolated, housebound service users, and, unbelievably, at-risk patients have been taken off medication by consultants. This at a time when the closure of St Senan’s will place added pressure on so-called “community care”.
In relation to Carl O’Brien’s analysis piece (Opinion, January 4th), the lack of therapeutic care in public hospitals is indeed shocking. St Senan’s does not even claim to be a therapeutic hospital, a startling admission.
Nursing staff there have described it as a “crisis centre”. In contrast, private hospitals, such as St John of God’s in Dublin, provide a wide range of therapeutic programmes, including to public patients lucky enough to live in their catchment areas. Small wonder then that sedatives are being overprescribed in public hospitals. Indeed if there is a strategy it is to medicate and do little else.
None of this is surprising given the consistent shrinkage in mental heath spending. The idea, now commonly promoted, that more services, or even adequate services, can somehow be delivered with less money is nonsense. Given the current financial constraints, prospects for the future look grim. Does anyone care? Certainly not the Government, or the HSE. – Yours, etc,