Focus on kids in adult psych wards

Putting children in adult psychiatric wards was a “gross interference with their human rights”, the Ombudsman for Children has said.

Launching his first annual report yesterday, Dr Niall Muldoon called for urgent changes to be made to the way children with mental-health issues are treated.

His office has dealt with a number of complaints where children were being placed in inappropriate care facilities.

Children were being accommodated in psychiatric wards or paediatric wards where no mental-health support was available. This was often due to insufficient beds in the appropriate adolescent psychiatric wards.

“The children and young people placed in such settings are in need of care, compassion, and treatment from specially trained staff but instead are just monitored to ensure they don’t commit suicide,” he said.

“We owe those children, who are in extreme turmoil and pain, much more respect than is being shown to them at present.

“This is a gross interference with their human rights and runs contrary to the commitment made by the State in 2011 and against the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and was no longer acceptable.”

According to the Mental Health Commission, there were 89 admissions of children to adult units last year — one in five of all admissions of children to mental-health facilities.

The age of the children admitted ranged from 13 years to 17, while 29% had been in an adult unit for more than 10 days. One in ten were involuntary detained.

The commission pointed out in its 2014 annual report that the “most unsatisfactory” situation was continuing, despite an increase in child and adolescent mental-health residential places.

Dr Muldoon said the commission had made it a legitimate target that, from December 2011, no child under 18 was to be admitted to an adult unit. “We need to push that forward,” he said.

His office had received complaints that children with eating disorders were being treated abroad because a service had not yet been established in Ireland.

In some cases funding of treatment abroad was delayed due to a lack of clarity on how it could be accessed in such circumstances.

Dr Muldoon said the situation is causing considerable distress. “While there is a plan to develop a specialist eating disorder service as part of the new children’s hospital, the development is not due for completion until 2019,” he said.

Overall, his office received 1,520 new complaints last year, with education the biggest single area of concern at 47%.

A quarter of the complaints related to family support, care, and protection. He said his office was precluded from examining allegations of professional misconduct made against teachers and school staff.

Furthermore, there was no alternative avenue of address for complaints as section five of the Teaching Council Act had yet to be commenced.

That section must be commenced without any further delay, he stressed.

Dr Muldoon said the matter was a serious concern for his office and had been an issue that they had highlighted with successive education ministers as well as the Oireachtas.