The Government has defended the standard of care in Galway’s main psychiatric unit after the country’s work safety watchdog was called in over complaints about staffing levels.

Oscar Pistorius was ordered by a judge to undergo psychiatric tests, meaning that the double-amputee athlete’s murder trial will be interrupted, possibly for two months.

Psychiatric nurses have called for a more comprehensive recording system to identify patients who died by suicide because they did not get the treatment they needed.

Emergency beds are being “under-utilised” at some of Cork’s mental health units and community services must be modernised, according to the HSE.

The Government and junior minister Kathleen Lynch were accused of prioritising “political expediency” over the needs of mental health patients as they were lambasted in the Seanad for shutting acute psychiatric beds in counties Galway and Cork.

A psychiatric nurse who stabbed a man with a bread knife during a drunken rage at an apartment in Limerick has been jailed for two years.

Nursing staff at a HSE psychiatric facility used the money of elderly patients to pay a priest for saying Mass and to buy items such as crockery, even though the HSE is supposed to fund such purchases.