However, Deputy Richard Renouf said that it was vital that his department improved mental-health services in the community to try to reduce the number of Islanders who reached crisis point, and added that he wanted to ‘find better ways of taking care’ of the needs of younger people.
‘Mental health is a worry to all of us in the Health Service and the Council of Ministers,’ the minister said. ‘The need for mental-health services seems to have increased greatly. We must get these services to a better state than they are at the moment.’
Currently, there is no dedicated safe place for Islanders with mental-health issues, who the emergency services are concerned about, to be taken. This is something Deputy Renouf says he wants to address.
‘We are thinking of something that is a facility that is open day and night to help people with mental-health problems so they don’t end up being taken by the police to accident and emergency for example,’ he said.
Deputy Renouf said no site for the facility had been ‘identified as yet’ and added: ‘Maybe at the beginning it does not need to be a place, just a team of people at the end of the phone. There are all sorts of options.’
However, he stressed that his department wanted to address people’s mental-health issues early on ‘before it gets to the last resort’.
‘If people are feeling unwell in their mental state, we want to be able to address what is concerning them before they end up in a police cell,’ Deputy Renouf said. ‘It’s about developing services in the community, not bringing people into the Hospital. If we can look after them in the community or GP surgeries, that is so important.’
Earlier this year Andrew Green, the then Health Minister, told the JEP that a £45 million mental-health centre could be built on the Overdale site if the scheme got the approval of the next Council of Ministers.
Mr Green said officers had drawn up plans for facilities which would treat both in- and outpatients on the site of the Westmount Road facility.
He also suggested that if the plans – which came about following a £350,000 feasibility study of the Island’s mental-health services – were given the go-ahead, a first-time buyers’ village could be built on the St Saviour’s Hospital site, as the patients who currently receive treatment for dementia and acute mental-health issues there would be treated in the new facility.
When asked about the latest on the potential scheme, Deputy Renouf said: ‘There has been work. It has not been finalised. There are still a lot of plans that are under discussion. I can’t really say more than that.’
