Concerns about understaffing at a mental health service that treated a 37-year-old man accused of killing a mother-of-four in Christchurch were escalated to the Minister of Health Andrew Little, the Herald has learned.
In a briefing on January 20, officials at the Ministry of Health told the minister that the workforce at the Canterbury regional forensic mental health service was so stretched that its secure psychiatric facility at Hillmorton Hospital was operating only 12 of its 15 beds and “running a waitlist for acutely unwell patients”.
The Herald understands that the man accused of killing Laisa Waka Tunidau, 52, in what police have described as a “random attack” in the suburb of Sockburn on Saturday was treated in the Hillmorton forensic facility.
There have been a spate of knife attacks on random members of the public by people with clear mental health issues and whom have been failed by out collapsing mental health system.
None of this can be a surprise right?
Every inch of the State is exhausted.
Every person trapped in the terrible bureaucracy and unfunded hell hole of any Government service are all ticking time bombs.
I’m guessing that now the violence of these sick and damaged people is starting to explode against random members of the public rather than their normal self harm pattern, ‘something must be done’.
That’s so Kiwi ain’t it?
Once the enormous problem we have been avoiding gets so huge that it starts killing others, then we look at ‘something must be done’.
Until we find a new means to tax the 1% and their financial elites, our mental health system will always be the underfunded bastard child of public health budgets.
As the stresses of the looming economic recession became even tighter, it will play out on the street with the failed vomiting their misdirected hate on anyone within knife swinging distance.
This is the era of endless entropy at a time of declining empathy.
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