Health Minister Bridget Archer has been unable to say whether mothers with serious mental illness will be able to stay with their babies under a new model of care replacing the Royal Hobart Hospital’s mother-baby unit.
The royal’s two-bed unit is due to close at the end of the year.
It will be replaced by a six-bed intensive residential parenting unit at St Johns Park in New Town.
The current unit treats mothers with complex mental illness, including bipolar disorder and a history of postnatal psychosis.
It is run by the Perinatal and Infant Mental Health Service, a team of psychiatrists and psychologists.
The new unit will be run by the Child Health and Parenting Service, whose staff are child and family health clinicians without specialist mental health training.
Its model of care lists one psychologist and no in-house psychiatrist.
Archer told parliament on Tuesday there would be “no reduction in capability” at the new facility.
“The same health professionals that care for mothers now at the Royal Hobart Hospital will be available to support families at St Johns Park,” she said.
Labor leader Josh Willie said the existing unit treated mothers with complex mental ill health, including bipolar disorder and a history of postnatal psychosis.
He said it had just two beds and a “constant” waiting list.
“Staff are saying your new model will leave mothers and their babies to fall through the cracks because it will only treat women with low to moderate depression and anxiety, require mothers to be psychologically well and have no in-house psychiatrist,” he said.
Willie asked whether psychiatrists from the Perinatal and Infant Mental Health Service would have admitting rights at the new unit.
Archer did not answer the question, saying she had given “a very fulsome answer” and that “there is no downgrade to services”.
Willie also asked whether mothers would receive inpatient psychiatric treatment while staying with their babies once the existing unit closed.
“Those are clinical decisions,” Archer said.
Asked again, she said such decisions were only made “in the safety and wellbeing interests of the mother and the baby concerned”.
Willie asked whether the new unit would admit women undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation for severe postnatal depression alongside their babies, as the former St Helen’s Private Hospital unit had done.
Archer did not address the treatment directly, saying care for mothers with severe illness such as postpartum psychosis was “not diminished or lost”.
Health workers who spoke to the ABC described the department’s assurances as misleading.
Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation state secretary Emily Shepherd said the new model differed from both St Helen’s and the current unit and the union wanted it to replicate the St Helen’s service.
Announcing the start of construction in December, Archer said the unit would allow mothers and babies to stay together while receiving support for “sleeping, feeding, behaviour and developing perinatal mental health concerns”.
Archer told parliament Labor members had previously called for “exactly what we are delivering at St Johns Park”.
In May 2023, then-shadow health minister Anita Dow told parliament there was a need for a long-term, community-based model, saying GPs and nurses at St Helen’s were “devastated that the service is going to be diminished”.
Independent Franklin MP David O’Byrne said nursing staff were still raising the alarm more than three years after southern Tasmanian families lost the St Helen’s service.
Labor MLC and shadow health minister Sarah Lovell said it was “completely disingenuous” for the government to claim the new unit was not a reduction in capability.
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