Mental heath

The Mental Health Service provides a comprehensive range of integrated, community-based child, youth, adult and forensic services, including in-patient care in Alice Springs and remote care throughout Central Australia.

Teams in Alice Springs include the following:

• community
• remote
• forensic
• child and youth/perinatal
• medical
• Crisis Assessment Triage Team (CATT)
• sub-acute facility
• quality and administration
• mental health inpatient unit at Alice Springs Hospital.

The Mental Health Inpatient Unit at Alice Springs Hospital is a modern 12-bed unit with the capability for a 4-bed high dependency unit. The unit has a team of skilled mental health professionals including mental health nurses, consultant psychiatrists, allied health professionals, clinical and non-clinical Aboriginal Health Practitioners and Aboriginal Health Workers. The team also work alongside local Ngangkari (traditional healers).

The consultation liaison psychiatry team, consisting of a psychiatric registrar and registered psychiatric nurse, provides advice, support, education and psychiatric consultation and care to both clients and clinical staff at the hospital and the renal clinic.

The Sub-Acute Mental Health Facility provides recovery-focused care for voluntary clients with a mental illness who require additional support but do not require in-patient care. The length of stay is based on individual needs with the capacity to offer two long-term beds for periods of up to a year, and a further 6 short-term beds for stays ranging from a few days to 3 months.

CATT offers a 24/7 service and is often the first point of contact for people experiencing mental health issues. The role of the team is to triage, assess and manage mental health presentations to Alice Springs Hospital Emergency Department and within the community.

Additional outpatient and community programs include the Child and Youth Mental Health Team, Community Mental Health Team, Forensic Mental Health Team, Mark Sheldon Remote Mental Health Team, Perinatal Mental Health and the Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic.

Teams in the Barkly region are based in Tennant Creek, provides assessment and case management to residents in the Barkly region.

Top End Mental Health Services (TEMHS) is responsible for the provision of psychiatric services to the Top End of the Northern Territory. It offers a range of training terms accredited by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists.

Trainees are able to complete their entire basic and advanced adult training experience within the Northern Territory. The terms available for registrar training currently include:

• adult acute inpatient
• adult community
• consultation liaison
• on call (emergency)
• psychiatry
• rural/ remote psychiatry.

There are also advanced (extended training location) positions available for supervised rural training for the East Arnhem and Katherine regions.

The acute inpatient psychiatry rotation to the TEMHS inpatient unit, located on the Royal Darwin Hospital (RDH) campus, has proved popular with interns and residents. RDH trainees in other training schemes such as general practice and emergency medicine have also found a 3 to 6 month term a valuable complement to their experience.