Family calls for emergency measures on 5th Anniversary of Nicky Stevens death

Monday the 9th of March is the 5th anniversary of our son Nicky’s death.   It’s a very difficult time for our whanau.                                      

Two days after his father’s birthday in 2015 he went missing from The Henry Bennett Centre. We had repeatedly warned them of the danger. 3 days later he was found in the Waikato River. 

Our whanau have had to spend the last 5 years in a very distressing battle with the DHB to get acknowledgement of the unsafe environment and practices that led to our son’s preventable death. 

 Coroner Wallis Bain ruled that his death was preventable. He said that his treatment was well short of what could be reasonably expected and that the deficiencies in his care at the Henry Bennett Centre enabled his death.  

We just want to be able to quietly grieve his loss knowing we have done all that we could to prevent a similar tragedy. But this year’s anniversary of his death isn’t going to be the quiet reflective one we had hoped for.  There is no peace for us when we know people are still being hurt or dying in the same ways and due to similar failures by the DHB. We’ve lost patience after repeatedly seeing the ongoing tragedies that could have and should have been prevented.

Instead, we find ourselves gathering together with other families, whose family members have died in similar circumstances to Nicky while in the care of the Waikato DHB or have been put at significant risk to themselves or others.   

Pictured. Ray Thomassen, Jane Stevens and Genevieve Simpson bereaved whanau who have lost loved ones while in the care of the DHB 

So great is the concern of our collective families we jointly wrote to the Government last week calling on them to undertake an urgent inspection into the quality and safety of Waikato DHB mental health services because of the continuing risks to and deaths of patients.

We had no idea at that time that the Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier had already undertaken an unannounced inspection in September and that his concerns would mirror ours.

Was it coincidence that his damming report came out only a few days after we had sent our open letter to the Government?

We were grateful that he didn’t pull any punches in his report, and it gave us some hope that the Government would have to put in place emergency measures to address the deeply concerning issues Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier identified. 

Pictured Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier

It was shocking to realise that the Waikato DHB’s Henry Bennett Centre is currently in breach of the UN Convention against torture but not surprising when you consider that this Convention includes cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. 

We listened to a radio interview with Peter Boshier the day his report was released and could feel the frustration in his voice. He didn’t mince words when he slammed the management of the DHB’s mental health services. He was quite rightly fuming when he expressed his concerns that many of his recommendations from their last inspection of the Waikato facility in 2017 had been ignored.  

It’s been our experience too that the DHBs response to justified criticism is to either attack, deny or ignore.

 It speaks to the culture of leadership still entrenched within the DHB and until this underlying problem is addressed we will never see the changes that are needed.   

No one is denying that it’s a difficult environment given the design and state of the DHB’s building, the rise in Meth use, and the lack of funding put into mental health for so long.  But its seems to us the DHB are using these issues and in particular the Meth crisis as yet another excuse. 

Henry Bennett Centre

These issues don’t account for the lack of effective leadership and management the Ombudsman put squarely into the frame.  They also don’t account for the degrading treatment, the unsafe risk assessments, the poor communication, and toxic culture, all of which impact hugely on the health and safety of service users.

What needs to happen now?

• There needs to be an emergency response to this dire situation – before any more people end up damaged or dead. And it needs to be a response that’s brings together all the stakeholders in this. Not just the usual mental health industry suspects and not done in the shadows.

• It needs some exceptional leadership and powers to act. It needs to be able to ask the hard questions and involve service users, staff, whanau.

• It needs to really listen to the affected and the disaffected, and must not blame or bully those who to speak out.

• It needs to come with a budget to make short term changes immediately and it needs to happen now.

That’s the message that we want the Minister to hear, given our stake in this we are prepared to put the work into it as well.

Senior Coroner Wallace Bain, who conducted the inquest into the death of our son Nicky, concluded in his findings that “the mental health system is in urgent need of being overhauled and significant changes implemented” This latest report from the Chief Ombudsman echoes those findings. 

So on the fifth anniversary of our son’s preventable death let Nicky’s legacy be that no more people will die because of failures of the Waikato DHB to provide safe, humane and decent care for those who are the most vulnerable in our community. 

Jane Stevens & Dave Macpherson