Statement re: P Nth Hospital secure smoking areas – management asked in 2015 to keep them open

The family of Nicky Stevens believe deceased Palmerston North Hospital mental health unit patient Chelsea Brunton would almost certainly be alive today had the management of Palmerston North Hospital agreed to a 2015 request to keep the secure outdoor smoking courtyards already in place open.

Palmerston North Hospital management was asked to keep them open, after a short-sighted DHB policy decision to close them. Mental Health Services Manager Janette Wylie replied in a letter to Mr Ricky Gee, a family member of another patient who had earlier died in the same facility, that she would be looking into the issue.

The secure garden smoking areas are shown in the plan of the Hospital’s mental health facility below, as is the letter from Janette Wylie to Mr Gee, and his comments on our Facebook page (‘Nicky Autumn Stevens’) made while Chelsea was still being searched for.

The inflexible, one-size-fits-all smoking policies followed by Mid-Central DHB, and other DHBs like Waikato, have contributed significantly to the deaths of several mental health services patients, such as Chelsea Brunton, and our son Nicky Stevens.

When patients are under stress already – connected with the reasons for them being in these facilities in the first place – forcing them off the hospital precincts, literally out onto the streets, to have a cigarette, unsupervised due to lack of staff and lack of any sensible risk analysis, is a recipe for disaster. While few people support, or like cigarette smoking, it is hardly the biggest problem when someone is ill enough to need to be in a mental health institution!

These DHBs have not shown a reasonable standard of care, and considering they had the means in almost all cases to provide safe smoking areas for their patients, and were asked to do so, they are culpable in these situations.

The Government should step in and require every inpatient mental health facility in this country to either provide and use secure outdoor smoking areas for patients, or provide one-on-one supervision for patients forced to go off-campus. We will be writing to Minister Jonathan Coleman asking that he do this, to avoid future deaths caused by these smoking policies.

“Ricky Gee In 2015, the services manager Ms Jannette Wylie Celebrated the final nail in the coffin when MIDCENTRAL locked off the ‘outdoor secure garden smokers area’ inside ward 21, forcing smokers to walk offsite to have a smoke. We expressed our major concern, after loosing Shaun in the HIGH NEEDS UNIT through failures such as lack of staff, I.e., what made this hospital think they had enough staff to watch people go on smoke breaks.

Regardless of whether the person is under the act or voluntary leave, if people seek help, you should not leave them alone. They go to you for help, of course if you leave them unsupervised people may disappear.”