New peer support services at ED

The specialists will provide comfort to ED patients at a time of crisis and help connect them to community services. Photo: RNZ

By Rachel Graham of RNZ

• New peer support services have started at Christchurch Hospital's Emergency Department

• The services will offer patients in mental distress comfort and help to connect with community resources.

• The minister of mental health says the move is not connected to changes in police's mental health response in EDs.

New peer support workers at Christchurch Hospital's emergency department say it feels special to now help patients at a place they have also experienced mental health distress.

The specialists - all of whom had previously visited the ED while under significant stress themselves - will provide comfort to patients at a time of crisis and help connect them to community services.

Christchurch is the fourth hospital to provide the peer support service, which was already available at Middlemore, Auckland City and Wellington Hospitals, and would be introduced to others.

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

Waiatamai Tamehana - one of the project's leaders - said she wanted to help others who had also endured a "long dark wait".

"I've been here through the ED pathway myself, a couple of decades ago, so it is great to work with our kaimahi who have also used this ED at some point in their lives, and now come back and support other people through it," she said.

"My world became really, really small at the time. So simple things, inner prompts, like go and eat something or get some water, that had gone. I could only manage little chunks of information coming at me from the nurses."

Tamehana said peer support workers could sit down with someone in distress, check how they were, find the resources they needed or just a quiet space.

Another project leader Dr Annie Southern said the staff members had also worked in other peer support roles.

Southern said the workers would not be doing assessments or providing clinical services, rather filling the role that family or friends would, with the added advantage of having extensive knowledge of community resources.

She said there was a lot of community support available that people did not know how to access.

"That's why they are turning up with their medical notes under their arms often. Coming into ED as a last resort when they can no longer deal with the emotional pain. And we are saying we are out there already, you may not know that we are in the community.... A lot of people don't meet the medical threshold to get treatment, so we can tell them all these other community services exist," said Southern.

She said the team would likely focus on people in emotional and mental distress, in an altered state, dealing with addictions and people dealing with "big emotions they can't regulate on their own".

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

On Monday police introduced a new policy, directing officers in some districts to stay no more than an hour after taking someone to an ED, unless there was an immediate safety risk.

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

He said peer support workers tended to spend around 40 minutes with patients.

"They aren't there to tell them what to do, but to share their story, and their journey of lived experience, and that is where I think some of the magic will happen."

The service will operate as a pilot for a year, and is likely to operate from about 4pm to 8pm, five days a week.