The interpretation of beds: More bedtime stories, or maybe they're dreaming?

Abstract

The Australian mental health system is weathering a deep crisis that places us at a critical juncture. The decisions to be made in the coming months could have adverse impact for decades. The Allison et al. (2020) paper tackles two critical issues in this process, though largely based on arguable premises: (a) the number of psychiatric hospital beds needed, and (b) the role of the National Mental Health Services Planning Framework (NMHSPF) as a planning tool for the public resourcing of mental health services. Local estimates based on the Atlases of Integrated Mental Health Care (Romero-López-Alberca et al., 2019) partially support Allison’s claim. The number of acute beds in Western Europe is broadly similar to that in Australia, but the number of subacute and non-acute hospital beds and the number of community residential beds are fewer in Australia. However, there is a substantial difference between stating that ‘the total availability of non-acute psychiatric beds in Australia is lower than in country “X”’, and inferring from this that ‘psychiatric non-acute beds should be increased by N% in the health district “Y”’. Such national figures provide no useful indication of a local mental health system’s need for hospital beds or effective community alternatives.