The retention of consultant psychiatrists remains “a problem” due to poor working conditions, lack of multi-disciplinary teams, and inadequate IT, the President of the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland has told the Medical Independent (MI).
At the College’s recent Spring Conference, Dr Lorcan Martin also voiced strong concerns about underfunding of mental health services and planned legislative changes affecting mental healthcare.
A “huge number” of psychiatry posts are unfilled or temporarily filled, Dr Martin told MI. “We think we will need another few hundred psychiatrists by 2030 to achieve the numbers we need. There are big gaps in the system in terms of getting people. And holding onto them is also a problem because very often, they are in situations where work conditions are poor, they are not adequately resourced, they don’t have a multi-disciplinary team, they don’t have IT resources, they don’t have admin resources, and so on.”
Dr Martin also expressed serious concerns about the Mental Health Bill 2024 and implications for patients who are involuntarily admitted and do not have capacity to consent to treatment.
The current Bill “will put us in a situation where we will be able to detain patients, but we may not be able to treat them without having to go to court, which would cause significant delays in treating them”.
“This of course causes protracted suffering and makes it more difficult for people to become well, because ongoing mental illness can have a neurotoxic effect on the brain and so damages the brain the longer it goes untreated. As with any illness, the ideal approach is to treat it as quickly as possible.” See conference coverage.
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