To email Minister of Mental Health Matt Doocey, click here…
Last week it was announced to the clinical team at Segar House – Rauaroha – the specialist psychotherapy service in Auckland, – that they were to be shut down.
What is Segar House? It’s a highly skilled team of therapists that provide treatment for the most chronically suicidal clients in the Auckland and Waitemata districts. These are people that generally have horrific trauma backgrounds, and have not been able to be helped by standard community based, one appointment a week type mental health treatment.
Instead, Segar House offers a five day a week, group based programme using the most up to date, and empirically supported treatment approaches for people with Borderline Personality Disorder, and complex post traumatic stress disorder.
And it works. It works for the clients, whose lives are improved, who can move onto living a life with meaning and purpose.
It works for the system as people who are as highly distressed as the people who wash up at Segar House use a lot of health services – inpatient hospital care, crisis services, and emergency department time.
And it works for the therapists, who get to do meaningful, effective therapy with people who absolutely need it, without the revolving door approach of a community, crisis driven service.
So if it works for the clients, the system and the staff, why is it being shut down?
Because the assessment of Te Whatu Ora is fatally flawed, and driven only by the austerity mindset of our current government. A mindset that can only see the total number of clients seen as numbers on a spreadsheet to be maximised. And having reduced people down to a number, then declare, based on no knowledge (or conversation with the experts either for that matter) that the numbers aren’t good enough.
Te Whatu Ora is proposing to simply shift the existing staff team (less than four full time equivalents, this place runs already on the smell of an oily rag) and reallocate them to community services. They also make the bold claim this will enable the clinicians to be better utilised, and that the clients will still receive the same treatment approach in the community. Which is utter rubbish.
It’s a bit like claiming we could just shut down the cardiac unit at Auckland hospital, put the cardio-thorassic surgeons into GP’s clinics, and there would be no change to the service people received. Oh, and GP’s see more patients, so the cardiac specialists should also up their case load!
We have our first ever Mental Health Minister with this Government, and of course I have been keenly following the various creative and necessary ways the Minister’s Innovation fund has been spread around to genuinely good pilot programmes.
To email Minister of Mental Health Matt Doocey, click here…
But given the relatively paltry amounts of money required to keep this service going and the incredible return on investment- financially and morally – Segar House provides, surely this service cannot just be allowed to slide into oblivion?
So I’m calling on Mental Health Minister Hon. Matt Doocey, who has repeatedly said that no frontline mental health and addiction jobs will be lost throughout any change process, to step in and direct Te Whatu Ora to halt this proposal and guarantee Segar House’s funding.
And, I’m asking everyone (including you!) to email the Minister and let him know you oppose the closure as well. Now is the time to keep the pressure up and get him to stop this closure NOW.
Simply click on this link, and tell him what you think (be polite!) To email Minister of Mental Health Matt Doocey, click here…
