From The Saturday Paper, 18 January 2025:
Psychiatrist Prachi Brahmbhatt likens the current state of public mental healthcare in New South Wales to battlefield medicine. “When the clinical leader is so pushed that they don’t have time to stop and think about the decisions that they’re making… while you’re trying to do seven things at a time, you’re not making the best decisions,” she says. “You’re doing this triaging, which might be okay for a battlefield, but that’s not what the health system should be.”
Brahmbhatt is a senior psychiatrist and clinical director at a major Sydney metropolitan hospital. She has worked in public mental health for two decades, first as a trainee, then as a fully fledged psychiatrist specialising in psychosis.
As of Tuesday, January 21, she will be one of more than 200 staff specialist psychiatrists working in public mental health in NSW to resign, facing an uncertain future and leaving behind the patients, staff, colleagues and trainees to whom they have dedicated so much of their lives. Read more (paywall).
Bianca Nogrady 