Slow crisis in the emergency department: bed block and human rights

The February 2019 podcast is an interview with Professor Tarun Bastiampillai, Professor of Psychiatry at the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University in Adelaide. Professor Bastiampillai is co-author of the Australasian Psychiatry article “Widespread emergency department access block: a human rights issue in Australia?”, which analyses the factors underlying the different standards applied to emergency psychiatric and emergency health care in emergency departments. The article advocates increasing Australia’s internationally low number of inpatient mental health beds per capita by applying the same expected quality frameworks to the mental health service as the rest of medicine.