New peer support services at Christchurch Hospital

• New pairs support services began at the emergency department of Christchurs Hospital

• Services will offer patients with comfort of mental suffering and will help connect with community resources.

• Mental Health Minister says the measure is not connected to changes in police mental health response at Eds.

New peer support workers at the Christchurch Hospital Emergency Department say it is now special to help patients at a place where they have also suffered mental health suffering.

Experts – all who have previously visited the emergency room under significant stress – will provide comfort for patients in a time of crisis and will help connect them to community services.

Christmas is the fourth hospital to provide peer support service, which was already available in Middlemore, Auckland City and Wellington Hospital, and would be presented to others.

Christchurch service is provided by Odyssey House, Stepping Stones Trust and Purapura Whetu.

Waiatamai Tamehana – one of the project leaders – said she wanted to help other people who had also suffered a “long dark wait.”

“I’ve been here through Ed’s path a few decades ago, so it’s great to work with our Kaimahi, who also used this ed at some point in their lives, and now come back and support other people,” she said.

“My world became very, very small at the time. So simple things, internal instructions, such as going and eating something or getting some water that had gone. I could only manage small pieces of information coming to me from nurses.”

Tamehana said that peer support workers can sit with someone in danger, see how they were, find the resources they needed or just a silent space.

Another project leader, Dr. Annie Southern, said team members also worked on other peer support functions.

Southern said workers would not be doing evaluations or providing clinical services, filling the role that family or friends, with the additional advantage of having a wide knowledge of community resources.

She said there was a lot of support from the available community that people didn’t know how to access.

“That’s why they are appearing with their medical notes frequently. Entering Ed as a last resource when they can no longer deal with emotional pain. And we are saying that we are already out there, you may not know that we are in the community … Many people do not meet the medical limit for treatment, so that we can tell them all these other community services,” said the south.

She said the team would probably focus on people in emotional and mental suffering, in an altered state, dealing with addictions and people who deal with “great emotions that cannot regulate on their own.”

Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey said the peer support service was not connected to changes in police mental health responses.

On Monday, police introduced a new policy, directing officers to some districts to stay more than an hour after taking someone ready -unless there was an immediate risk of safety.

Doocey said there have always been gaps in the system and the government had a long -term project to improve the response to emergency mental health crisis.

He said peer support workers tend to spend about 40 minutes with patients.

“They are not there to tell them what to do, but to share their story and their journey of experienced experience, and that’s where I think part of the magic will happen.”

The service will function as a pilot for a year and will probably operate from 16h to 20h, five days a week.