Too many mentally ill patients in the community?

[ed.hall]

Hi, i'm actually a nurse from Sydney, Australia. I was just wondering what you lot thought of the state of community mental health over there?

Here in Aus we used have a lot more mental health in-patient facilities, however a shift in health policy shut a lot of these down in favour of caring for these patients in the community.

I have friends who work in Emergency Departments and they complain that sometimes the majority of their shift is taken up looking after mentally ill patients because there are limited readily available inpatient psychiatric beds to accomadate them. Compounding that, they remark that if the patient hadn't been released back into the community earlier than was safe then they would have had more of a chance of fully stabilising their mental state whilst being an inpatient.

Is your situation different from state to state? Do you think you have similar problems as here in Aus?

Or do you think that most healthcare facilities are stretched anyway due to increased population and limited resources?

I'm not quite sure personally but I thin, over here at least, these issues need to be adressed soon...