In a letter to An Tanaiste and Minister for Health and Children, Mary Harney, The Irish College of Psychiatrists has expressed serious concerns about the future organisation of Mental Health Services………

“With the imminent formation of the Health Service Executive in January 2005 I wish to take the opportunity to remind you, the new Health Service Executive and the new CEO, Professor Aidan Halligan of the concerns of psychiatrists regarding the future organization of Mental Health Services in this country”.

Dr Kate Ganter in the letter indicated that these concerns had been raised previously with Minister Martin, on 22^nd December 2003 and to Mr K Kelly (Interim Health Services Executive) on 4^th August 2004.

Dr Ganter went on to state, “I wish to reiterate the position of the Irish College of Psychiatrists (the professional body which represents the 590 psychiatrists in this country); the College considers that the management of the Mental Health Services under the Community/Continuing Care Programme is not in the best interest of the Mental Health Services.  Our position is as follows:

We wish all mental health services to be included in the National Hospitals Office and we wish to continue to expand the number of acute units in major hospitals and establish day hospital / day programmes and out-patients at Local Hospitals (Hanly recommendations). 

This would also mean that all specialties of mental health are included in the one directorate and are therefore under the one Management structure, encouraging integration of services across the ages.  This is a recommendation of the Working Party in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry – 2^nd Report.  As psychiatry does not fall neatly into the proposed management structures, it tends to get relegated into structures, which do not reflect its function.  The structures are developed with surgery and medicine in mind. 

In the future with the introduction of the Health Reforms many of the other medical specialty services will be delivered in a similar fashion to that of psychiatric services at present.   An example is the development of community paediatrics and the services for people with chronic illness such as diabetes.  The development of well-resourced Local Hospitals will speed up this process so that the delivery of these services will begin to resemble the delivery of mental health services. 

We also consider that one management system for mental health would hopefully mean a greater share of the health budget for all patients.  Mental Health has not received an increase this year and we believe this is totally unacceptable, given that we fell from 9% to 6.8% of the health budget last year. I can emphatically say that this level of decrease is having serious implications for service delivery to our mostly vulnerable patients.

A reasonable alternative solution to the problem could be to establish a National Mental Health Services Directorate”

Dr Ganter, Chairperson of the Irish College of Psychiatrists also requested a meeting - so that the urgent matters of concern could be discussed.