Psychiatric hospital permanently reduces number of adult beds
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MANAGERS at New Craigs Psychiatric Hospital have decided to make a temporary reduction in the number of adult beds permanent.
Numbers were cut from 54 to 48 in August due to "extreme staffing pressures" caused by people being off sick and, some claimed, others quitting their jobs due to being overworked or stressed.
The staffing problems have now eased, and health chiefs have freed up 17 beds by getting people places in care homes or setting up at-home social care packages for them.
But they have decided to make the temporary bed cut for adults permanent, saying they want to increase the number of beds for elderly people with dementia instead.
Critics fear patients in crisis are being given just enough treatment to stabilise them before being sent home too early to ease pressure on beds.
But Mike Perera, NHS Highland’s general manager for mental health, said senior management and the clinical leadership team felt confident that the adult bed numbers agreed upon were correct.
And the organisation’s associate medical director Boyd Peters said it was wrong to think that hospital treatment was the only way to care for the mentally ill and it was "a fallacy" to believe the right thing to do was to put people in hospital and leave them there.
"That’s a bonkers assessment", he said. "Being in bed causes risks in itself. We have lots of people who come into the hospital and go back out. They come in and then when they’re feeling a wee bit more stable, they go back out."
An admissions suspension was in place after the bed numbers were reduced from 54 to 48.
However, the health chief said this only applied to patients from other areas who, in normal circumstances, under a good-neighbour transfer agreement, are transferred to New Craigs if their local hospital is full.
Mr Perara insisted the bed reduction was "borne out of the fact that no general adult Highland patient has been unable to be admitted to New Craigs since moving to the reconfigured adult beds in August".
Dr Peters said the hospital’s staffing problems had eased because more nurses had been recruited but he said: "We really only need 42 general adult beds to function."
He added: "The success story is that by getting a small team working more proactively to get people out of the hospital we have reduced the number of people who are stuck long term.
"We simply made a bigger effort to get people out who had been there for a long time, it just meant social work getting them into the right care environment.
"So in the last six months this number is down from 24 patients to seven. We have taken a lot of the pressure out of the system."
He said this process reinforced the need to increase in-patient bed numbers for the growing older adult population and there were plans to open more beds for elderly patients with mental health problems such as senile dementia.
"It’s the same number of beds in total, we are just trying to use them differently," he said.
Highlands and Islands SNP MSP Maree Todd, who spent 20 years as a clinical pharmacist at New Craigs before switching to politics, was pleased to hear managers had worked to reduce the number of delayed discharges.
And she said there was clear evidence that it was, in many cases, better to let people stay at home while they were undergoing mental health treatment rather than "parking them in hospital miles away from home".
However, the bed reduction in the adult admission ward has caused concern for Ron Williamson, who runs the city-based suicide-prevention helpline Mikeysline.
He said: "I attended a meeting yesterday with a whole group of people including the police, The Samaritans and The Befrienders, and with one voice they knew about the number of people turning up for treatment at New Craigs and then coming back out.
"It’s not necessarily the case that people are being turned away but they are in and out within a few hours. It’s almost like a revolving door.
"I do know that Mike Perera is doing his best, but I worry he’s trying to split three fish and four loaves between the masses."
Dr Peters insisted: "Despite our lack of staff we have managed to staff enough beds in the ward to actually deliver the service that we need to, but my anxiety for the future is we need more beds for older people."
