GUEST BLOG: David Macpherson – Mental Health facilities – poor care, avoided responsibility & side-stepped accountability

Last week I attended a ‘lecture’ at Waikato University, given by Waikato DHB CEO Nigel Murray – on ‘the difference between accountability and responsibility’ in the health sector.

In his view, CEO’s are ‘accountable’ for health outcomes to their governance Boards and via them to the Government, but delegate the ‘responsibility’ for ensuring those outcomes happen to various people lower down the pecking order. This is a standard senior management strategy that avoids them having to get involved in the day to day nitty gritty of running the organisation they work for.

In Murray’s case, in stints at Auckland DHB, Southland DHB, Fraser Health in British Columbia and now Waikato DHB, that avoidance of responsibility has seen him get offside with a wide range of staff and staff organisations – and, in a number of mental health cases I am seeing at close hand, with patients and their families.

In the last year mental health staff, junior doctors and most of Waikato Hospital’s Orthopaedic unit have all sharply criticised senior DHB management for being out of touch, aggressive and unable or unwilling to provide them the resources they need to do their job. Murray, following his accountability/responsibility mantra, has mostly kept out of the limelight by delegating the message delivery to his underlings.

In the mental health side of DHBs’ operations, at least two major facilities – at Waikato and Palmerston North Hospitals – are overdue for a complete upgrade, following a series of patient deaths at both facilities. Neither Murray or his Mid-Central counterpart are being held accountable for those delays or, in fact, the deaths that occurred there (one of which was our son Nicky’s).

The parents of Erica Hume, a Mid-Central DHB patient who died in 2014 while in the care of the mental health facility at Palmerston North Hospital, this week attended the ‘Quality & Excellence Advisory Committee’ and attacked their DHB for “stalling” the upgrade due there, and Waikato DHB has made no moves yet to set in motion the upgrade to the Henry Bennett Centre ordered by a Ministry of Health review almost a year ago.

In addition, in a report yet to be publicly released, Waikato DHB’s ‘Quality & Public Safety’ unit is claiming that the “overall care” [given to our son Nicky] “was of a good standard”. Despite his death while in their legal care, and the ignoring by staff of all the warnings given, it appears the DHB are trying to ensure those that are supposedly ‘accountable’ for our son’s care, will not be held ‘responsible’ for his death.

From the viewpoint of our whanau, the buck stops with the CEO and the Board, and I’m sure Erica Hume’s family feels the same down in Manawatu. Neither family is out for revenge, but we do believe that people and organisations have to be held accountable, and everyone involved – up to the Minister – have to accept responsibility for ensuring preventable deaths in our mental health facilities stop occurring.

David Macpherson is TDB’s mental health blogger. He became involved in mental health rights after the mental health system allowed his son to die. He is now a Waikato DHB Member-elect.