TAILORED swipe cards and women-only areas will be introduced at Werribee Mercy Hospital to make its mental health unit safer for women, with a new report revealing that almost half the women in psychiatric units have been sexually assaulted.
The Victorian Mental Illness Awareness Council (VMIAC) report states that in the past 20 years many women have been abused, assaulted and harassed by male patients and staff in the state’s mental health centres.
A survey of 50 women who had been admitted to psychiatric units for treatment found that 85 per cent of them felt unsafe, while 67 per cent reported being sexually harassed. Forty-five per cent said they had been sexually assaulted.
Mercy Health chief executive Stephen Cornelissen said there had been fewer than a dozen allegations of sexual assault reported to the hospital in the past three years, but that was too many.
“Over the past three years Mercy Health has improved the way it assesses and manages risk in its mental health unit and introduced specific practices to improve safety for women in our care,” he said.
“New state government funding of $259,000 will improve the current unit to include tailored swipe card access allowing clients to lock their bedrooms, a client nurse call system and gender specific courtyards.”
Mr Cornelissen said psychiatric units had been designed to operate as mixed gender facilities, which limited the ability of staff to restrict access to bedrooms.
He said a new state government-funded mental health unit, opening at the hospital in 2016, would address the problems by including areas only accessible by women and staff.
VMIAC director Isabell Collins said while women-only areas and swipe cards were a step in the right direction, there needed to be many changes to the way mental health facilities operated. Many women who completed the survey said their reports of abuse and harassment had been ignored by staff.
“There is an attitude that women with mental illnesses don’t matter,” Ms Collins said. “When these women aren’t taken seriously, it is soul-destroying. It is bad enough that you have been raped or sexually assaulted, but to have someone undermine that is devastating.”
Ms Collins said mental health units needed to ensure all patients were assessed on admission to determine their vulnerability to being abused or abusing others. The report found that assessments were often skipped because nurses had too much other paperwork.
Mr Cornelissen said patients at Werribee were always assessed on admission.
