Queensland health is scrapping its controversial locked door policy on adult mental health units. Medical professionals and human rights advocates have welcomed the move but not everyone believes it is for the best.
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00:00 Currently, all entry and exit doors on adult mental health units in Queensland's public
00:06 hospitals must be locked, making us the only state in Australia to have this requirement.
00:12 In a statement to the ABC, Queensland Health has confirmed from July 1, locking up those
00:16 patients will become discretionary.
00:19 It's a clinical decision made by clinicians on the day who know the patients.
00:24 The policy was introduced in 2013 by Campbell Newman's government, and for the past decade,
00:30 medical professionals and human rights activists have been pushing for it to be repealed.
00:35 So it affects people's self-esteem and imbues in people a sense of their seclusion and separation
00:43 from the rest of society.
00:45 There are hopes it will improve experiences for patients and staff.
00:49 So I think anything that will help reduce the level of agitation in those wards, such
00:56 as having the ability to open the doors, is a good thing.
01:00 The former executive director of the Royal Brisbane and Women's Mental Health Centre
01:04 says the locked ward policy did very little to prevent patients absconding in the first
01:08 place.
01:09 It meant on average four patients left a week instead of five.
01:13 So the idea that politicians had that by locking the doors we would have nobody absconding,
01:22 that's just not the case.
01:23 Alex, who was asked not to be identified to protect his family, lost his son to suicide
01:28 after he absconded from a mental health unit in 2012.
01:33 He believes his son would still be alive if an effective locked ward policy had been in
01:37 place at the time.
01:38 He was there to receive treatment to try to defuse this terrible condition.
01:44 He has this plea to Queensland Health.
01:46 Please be ultra careful in how you implement this policy because it could have catastrophic
01:52 results for families, obviously for the sufferers themselves.
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