Majority of users of mental health facilities unhappy with standards

Patient responses: Some 60 per cent of users of long-stay mental health facilities in the State have rated their experience …

Patient responses: Some 60 per cent of users of long-stay mental health facilities in the State have rated their experience of mental health services as mixed or bad in a new survey.

The research, which has been published by an expert group assembled by the Department of Health to devise a framework for the development of mental health policy, found 18 per cent rated their experience of mental health facilities as bad and 42 per cent rated their experience as mixed. The remaining 40 per cent said their experience was good.

When asked what made their experience bad, one patient reported being "left in bed for a month without any staff contact".

The same patient added: "I am here for over four weeks now and my doctor has been on holidays for two weeks. I have only been seen here three times in all.

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"I am an outdoor person and I am locked up in here with no access to the outside. I am cracking up. The medication is not suiting me, it is making me drool all the time and that is very embarrassing. My basic human rights are being violated."

Another patient said nurses were overworked and could mistake a patient for someone else. "I was mistaken for someone who was bringing in tablets and never apologised to when this was found out to be untrue.

"It was upsetting; especially when it was my first day... another patient threatened to rape me."

Still another said: "Some staff are bullies, I just need someone to listen... I regularly get pushed around or dragged out of bed. The other day there was a female patient lying on the ground and a male nurse came over to her and kicked her to get up."

Those who described the service as good were high in their praise for the nurses who cared for them.

A majority of those surveyed rated the facilities they were treated in as clean with good quality food.

A total of 100 patients, both male and female and of all ages, were interviewed for the study.

Some 68 per cent of them were dependant on welfare payments. "This finding highlights issues of poverty and its correlation to mental ill health," the study said.

Almost a third didn't know what medication they were on.

Separately, the expert group, chaired by Prof Joyce O'Connor, looked at data from 369 questionnaires completed by other mental health service users and their families.

Of this group, 10 per cent rated their recent experience of mental health services as bad, 48 per cent said their experience was mixed and 36 per cent rated it as good.

The expert group is also reviewing 154 submissions from the public and hopes to publish its 10-year framework by next June.

Most of the submissions claimed there was an over-reliance on medication in the treatment of mental health problems. They felt medication should be used as a last resort.

Speaking at the publication of the research, Mr Tim O'Malley, Minister of State at the Department of Health, said there had been overuse of medication in the treatment of mental health in the past.

He also said the current practice whereby medical card holders don't have a choice of which psychiatrist they can see, or the facility to change psychiatrist if they felt they weren't making progress, would have to change.

"Unfortunately, people's experiences with mental healthcare services vary from exceptional standards of care and treatment to poor and less than satisfactory care. As a consequence, these imbalances contribute to and sustain an uneven spread of strengths and deficiencies in service delivery," he said.

Mr O'Malley went on to indicate he wanted strict controls over counsellors. "I am extremely worried that there are people out there with very little qualifications practising as counsellors," he said.

He also said he would ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Health, Ms Harney to look at allowing patients with new doctor-only medical cards who have mental health problems to also get free therapy if there was evidence provided that they needed it.