Grieving mum calls for hospital records overhaul after teen daughter's suicide

Posted May 25, 2018 05:07:04

Video: 'I was outraged, why aren't these hospitals talking to each other?' (ABC News)

"Rani was a really beautiful soul who unfortunately just got caught up in some really bad situations."

Those are the words of grieving mum Kerrie Stanley, and already you know how this story ends.

It's a painful one. And familiar.

Infographic: Kerrie fought to keep Rani close as she struggled with mental health issues. (Supplied: Kerrie Stanley)

As Rani entered her teenage years she became increasingly rebellious. She fell in with a bad crowd and then the drugs started.

She would disappear for days, couch-surfing and spinning stories for the parents of friends who would let her stay without so much as a phone-call to Kerrie to say where her little girl was.

"She managed to do this for about a year and a half," Kerrie said.

"What I found most difficult at that time was, I knew she was staying at other family homes and not one parent called me."

Kerrie struggled to find a way to reach her daughter, who was hellbent on keeping her mum at arm's length even as she desperately needed the support.

Support to navigate school, mental health issues, a drug problem and increasingly abusive personal relationships.

"We gave it all we could, she just couldn't get over the line … there was no coming back for her."

On February 22 Rani was found dead in a city parking lot. She was 18. The cause: suicide.

'Hospitals don't talk to each other'

The questions around how, where and when faded into the background for Kerrie and her family at first, as they set their minds to preparing a loving service.

It wasn't until later that the events of Rani's final days would be revealed, and start to paint a picture of a health service struggling to cope with complex mental health problems.

In fact, it was at her funeral that Kerrie first started to learn the truth.

"This woman came up to me, I didn't know her, and she was terribly distraught and said, 'I was with Rani the night before, I couldn't keep her in'," Kerrie said.

The woman was a nurse at a hospital in outer Melbourne, where Rani had been taken because of a suicide attempt only hours before her eventual death.

At first Kerrie was confused — at the time she didn't know Rani had even been to that hospital. But over time she managed to piece together the details.

On February 15 Rani was found in Melbourne's CBD after a suicide attempt and taken to a city hospital, where she was admitted to a psych ward.

On February 18 she discharged herself.

On the 21st she was again found in an erratic and suicidal state, this time at an outer suburb, and was taken to a different hospital. Rather than be admitted, she instead chose to leave.

The next morning she was dead.

Photo: This is the last photo taken of Rani, pictured with mum Kerrie and brother Connor, before her death in February. (Supplied: Kerrie Stanley)

Kerrie was distraught to learn this, and is now calling for greater integration of hospital and medical records.

It is not known what, if any, records the second hospital accessed on the night before Rani's death, but Kerrie has been told they didn't have her full history.

"I said (to the police), 'Why didn't they know she was taken to the psych ward only three days earlier? Why didn't they keep her in?'"

"They said, 'Well, there's no way to know because the hospitals don't talk to each other'.

"I was outraged at that, I thought how can this be? Something so common."

Kerrie said she wasn't blaming the staff on call, because they were only doing what they could with the information they had.

"If they had known, it could have definitely prevented it, at least for that night," she said.

"Change has to happen … this will be Rani's legacy."

Photo: Baby Rani was a "beautiful" soul, Kerrie says. (Supplied: Kerrie Stanley)

'They're treating patients without all the information'

Sharing of patient information is complex and varies between states.

Victorian guidelines say that when a patient is accepted into a public mental health service they should be entered into a statewide database, which records their demographic and clinical data.

If they present at another public health service, that information should be available.

However, there are complications.

Even if that patient information is brought up, the bar for holding someone against their will on mental health grounds is high, and patients can often be assessed and allowed to leave.

And it's made more complex when private hospitals are included, as they do not have access to the same statewide database. They can request discharge summaries from other hospitals, which if provided are often sent via fax.

Professor Patrick McGorry is the executive director of Orygen, a youth mental health service, and said Kerrie had identified a serious issue in the system.

He said a starting point was strengthening links across the youth mental health foundation, headspace.

"We need to have one medical record system across all headspace sites and they need to be integrated with the state-funded community mental health programs," he said.

"There are probably other linkages between police and drug and alcohol services that also need to be built.

"What [Rani] fell into was a huge hole and there are hundreds of thousands of young people falling into that hole every day."

Photo: Professor Patrick McGorry says people are falling through the cracks of a broken mental health system. (Alan Porritt: AAP)

The Federal Government is currently rolling out the My Health Record initiative, which it hopes will contain basic information for all Australians by the end of 2018, like allergies, ongoing medical conditions, hospital discharge summaries and pathology tests.

Professor McGorry said there were privacy concerns when it came to the type of mental health records that might be included in that data, but they had to be weighed against hospitals making decisions in the dark.

"Some protections have to be built in, but you can see what happens if you don't actually have this communication happening," he said.

"Because people are making treatment decisions based on inadequate information, and they make big mistakes.

"These are preventable deaths. None of these people have terminal illnesses when they die, they all could be saved if they were helped in the right way and currently we're not able to help them all in the right way."

Topics: suicide, health, mental-health, government-and-politics, australia