24 August 2021
A senior mental health nurse and winner of the 2020 ANMF (SA Branch) Emerging Leader Award has quit his role at SA Health, delivering an ominous tweet: “time to stop trying to fix what is out of my control’’.
David Hains, a Mental Health Liaison Nurse Consultant in the ED of the Flinders Medical Centre, is also an internationally recognised figure in the field of Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT).
“Yesterday I quit my job in SA Health after 21 years of faithful and dedicated service,” Mr Hains stated in a Twitter post on the weekend.
“Thank you to all of my wonderful colleagues.
“Now time to stop trying to fix what is out of my control, and start working on what I CAN do.”
The ANMF (SA Branch) told Adelaide online newspaper InDaily his resignation is symptomatic of a system in crisis, with mental health patients facing increasingly long delays in emergency departments and clinicians burning out.
“I’m not aware of David Hains’s circumstances so I can’t comment specifically on his reasons for resignation,” ANMF (SA Branch) CEO/Secretary Adj Associate Professor Elizabeth Dabars AM told InDaily.
“But certainly in his tweet that he published, we certainly share his frustrations at the lack of movement in the area.
“We know that the mental health system has been in crisis for months. It’s been under extreme duress and we have criticised the Government publicly for their lack of actions or their plans to fix.”
Dabars told InDaily the State Government was expanding capacity in emergency departments “but there’s no in-hospital capacity, there’s no greater hospital capacity, and there certainly is no greater community capacity either”.
“There’s a major problem with the number of available mental health staff and we know that these pressures are causing people to become extremely fatigued and extremely frustrated,” she said.
“It’s bringing morale right down. I haven’t seen it at lower levels. People feel so frustrated and unable to deliver appropriate, safe and quality care to their patients.”
Ms Dabars said more beds were needed in the system, particularly inpatient and psychiatric intensive care beds “to get people out of the emergency department”.
“It seems to have fallen on deaf ears,” she told InDaily.
“And it’s deeply frustrating for staff.”
“They’ve got huge gaps in the rosters…
“The clinicians are amazing and do an incredible job but they are just stymied at every turn,’’ Ms Dabars said, adding she had “every empathy” for Mr Hain’s tweet.
“The lack of resourcing, the lack of support and the lack of structure that would enable them to provide good and decent care, it just doesn’t exist at the moment.’’
Ms Dabars also welcomed the appointment of forensic psychiatrist Paul Furst as executive director of mental health and prison health services at CALHN, saying he was “extremely capable”.
Dr Furst, who is also the SA branch chair of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, replaces Adjunct Professor John Mendoza, who quit his CALHN post in April, saying the health department “couldn’t organise a chook raffle’’.
“It’s good that they’ve been able to attract someone (Dr Furst) to that position of his calibre,” Ms Dabars told InDaily.
“I think fundamentally the problem remains that the issues that Professor Mendoza raised on his departure have not been resolved and I think that’s very distressing.
“And it’s going to make the work very, very difficult but again we call on the Government to make the changes that are necessary.’’
Read the full InDaily article
here.