WA’s health boss has instructed his department to stop employing overseas-trained doctors in Perth hospitals, and says he wishes he could “blow up” Graylands Hospital, the state’s largest mental health facility.
Graylands, which has been the source of contention for decades, and was recently the subject of a spate of inquests which found the ageing facility was overcrowded and under-resourced.
In the early 1990s, the State Government signed a national agreement to phase out stand-alone psychiatric hospitals.
More than two decades later, Graylands is still standing, and is the only facility of its kind in the country.
Acting director-general Bryant Stokes told a parliamentary committee he hoped to “get rid” of the psychiatric hospital by early next decade.
Outside the hearing, he said the timing of any closure would be up to the Government.
“Timeframes require capital budgets and expenditure, and it’ll be dependent on what the Government wishes to do in that regard,” Professor Stokes said.
“In this way, the Mental Health Commission and the Mental Health Commissioner, Tim Marney, he and I both are talking in the same language about this sort of situation, but I suspect no major change will occur in the next five years.”
The State Government has been slowly decommissioning wards within the psychiatric facility, and says it may eventually be closed altogether as WA moves towards community focused care.
A full closure would involve shutting down the facility’s Frankland Centre, a maximum-security psychiatric centre that mainly caters for patients who have been referred by the prison system and judiciary.
Professor Stokes said while there is no doubt the state still needs to make similar services available, he believes the patients would be better served in a different environment.
“At the moment the Frankland Centre is ill-equipped to deal with patients that require acute services,” he said.
“Many of them are sent from the judiciary… space has to then be found for them to be kept in Graylands centre, and often that necessitates sending patients back to the prison environment when they haven’t had their treatment completed or even completely assessed.
“So if such an area was in a prison environment that makes it a lot easier, but I do not want anyone to consider that I want it to be in the prison physically; but it can be in the environment of a prison, with its own building and its own containment and so forth.”
Overseas-trained doctors no longer ‘necessary’
Professor Stokes has also told the hearing he has instructed his department to stop employing any more overseas-trained doctors working in Perth hospitals.
WA employs more international doctors than any other state, with almost 40 per cent of its medical practitioners trained overseas.
Professor Stokes said while those doctors have historically been able to fill gaps in the sector, a rapid increase in the number of local graduates means overseas doctors are now no longer as necessary in Perth hospitals as they once were.
Outside the hearing, Professor Stokes said the department would discuss reducing the number of overseas doctors with the Minister for Health, Kim Hames.
“Now we’re getting more and more doctors graduating and so forth, and less positions being made available for them,” he said.
“We’ve been very concerned by the number of overseas doctors that are filling positions in the hospitals at the moment.
“And they have been necessary, let’s face it, very importantly necessary over the last many years, but now we’re getting more and more doctors graduating… so we don’t need the overseas doctors as we did some years ago.”
Professor Stokes said he had asked the chief medical officer to look at reducing their numbers.
“I’ve asked him to look at reducing those areas in conjunction with discussion with the Minister, who has the final say, and to try and therefore fill those positions with our own doctors,” he said.
“There’s been a shortage of doctors over the years, as you know, and now the increased numbers of doctors is slowly increasing, and we’ve gotta find positions for them.