‘These are preventable deaths’: 40 Victorians suing hospitals over the loss of their loved ones

At least 40 Victorians are preparing to launch legal action against the state’s hospitals over claims their loved ones died by suicide after being prematurely discharged or denied critical care.

In one case, healthcare workers deemed a patient a “high risk of suicide” just hours before he was sent home from hospital. He took his life less than two days later.

The situation has prompted health experts and healthcare workers to call for more mental health beds, staff and community services to meet the growing demand for help.

Daniel Opare, Shine Lawyers’ medical law practice leader in Victoria, is representing dozens of families who have lost loved ones to suicide shortly after they were sent home from psychiatric units or turned away. Most of the deaths occurred between 2021 and now.

“These are not rare or isolated tragedies,” he said. “It is a pattern of people seeking help and being turned away, or being sent home far too early.”

He said clinicians were under extreme pressure to free up beds and not making decisions in patients’ best interests.

“Relatives and carers know when something is wrong, and ignoring them can have fatal consequences,” Opare said.

On the day he was discharged from the mental health unit at Maroondah Hospital in May 2023, clinical staff wrote in their notes that Richard Ang was at high risk of suicide.

The 61-year-old—whose mental health spiralled downwards following a marriage separation and the loss of his job at Metro Trains—had spent two weeks in hospital following a suicide attempt.

“Despite how unwell he was, he had expressed a strong desire to get better and be there for his family,” said his 32-year-old son, Martin, who called an ambulance after finding his dad in a critical state at the family home in Wheelers Hill in Melbourne’s south-east.

The hospital notes, obtained by this masthead, are chillingly specific. Ang had not only expressed suicidal thoughts to clinicians but had talked about his plan, right down to the location.

But he was discharged four hours later after a psychiatrist revoked the treatment order that had kept Ang in the mental health ward.

“I spoke to the doctors. I was like, ‘Are you sure he’s all right?’” Martin recalled. “He was just not looking people in the eye. He was not responsive.”

Less than 48 hours after Richard was discharged, Martin discovered his father had taken his own life.

“I thought I was dreaming … It’s some scene that you watch from a movie,” Martin said. “I thought, ‘Maybe I found him in time.’ The body was cold.”

Martin is seeking compensation from Eastern Health through Shine Lawyers for the pain and suffering caused by his father’s death. The experience has left him needing counselling and significant time away from work.

He is also calling for expert panels to determine when a treatment order can be revoked, rather than leaving these high-stakes decisions to a single clinician.

While the state government has invested more than $223 million into suicide prevention and response initiatives following the mental health royal commission, many working in the sector say more is needed.

Professor Patrick McGorry, executive director of youth mental health organisation Orygen and former Australian of the year, said patients were being discharged too early from mental health units every day.

“Back in the ’80s, we would keep someone with an acute episode in for six weeks and then carefully plan the discharge,” he said. “Now they spend a few days in hospital if they’re lucky enough to even get in.”

McGorry said he had lost count of the number of people who had taken their own lives after failing to access appropriate mental health support.

“These are preventable deaths. These people do not have terminal illnesses. If they were looked after carefully and properly during that acute, risky period, the death rate could be reduced dramatically.”

There has been a 7 per cent rise in suicides in Victoria since the pandemic. In the same period, there have been reductions in NSW and Queensland.

Mental health-related emergency department cases are also on the rise, increasing by almost a third over the past decade, according to Victorian Health Department data.

Coroner’s Court data shows that 520 Victorians took their lives within six weeks of being a mental health inpatient between 2009 and 2018.

Health and Community Services Union Victorian secretary Paul Healy said mental health workers were under intense pressure to free up beds to alleviate overcrowding in emergency departments and ambulance ramping.

“You are told, ‘Get people in, get people out’ – sometimes you have to discharge three people a shift,” said Healy, whose union represents mental health workers.

“It leads to a situation where people are not in the best place to be discharged.”

Healy estimates there is a deficit of at least 200 adult acute mental health beds. He said an additional 1500 staff were needed to service these beds.

Jason Daddy never made it into an acute mental health bed. In 2022, his wife, Therese, phoned the mental health triage service at Werribee Mercy Hospital six times over the course of a month to seek help for her increasingly depressed and anxious husband.

She desperately wanted her husband – an engineer who designed trains for Metro Trains as well as seats in Teslas – to be admitted to hospital.

On June 19, 2022, Therese drove him to the emergency department at the busy hospital in Melbourne’s west in the hope he would finally get clinical care.

She claims that when she arrived at the emergency department, staff were dismissive and told her she was capable of caring for him at home because she had worked as a midwife.

“I was stuck between a rock and a hard place because they didn’t want us there, and my husband didn’t want to be there either,” she recalled. “They just wanted us gone.”

Daddy took his life at home 19 days after being turned away from the hospital’s acute mental health beds.

Therese is still struggling to come to terms with the loss of her kind, warm and intelligent husband.

“It’s not just the grief, it’s the trauma of being dismissed,” she said. “Every time I see a hospital now, I just feel that same panic. You lose your trust in the people who are meant to keep you safe.”

A state government spokesman said every suicide was one too many and its thoughts were with families who had lost loved ones.

He said the government had made significant investments to overhaul Victoria’s mental health system after the royal commission, which tabled its final report in 2021.

This included increasing the workforce by more than 25 per cent and delivering more than 170 new acute public mental health beds.

But Phillipa Thomas, chief executive of Mental Health Victoria, said the state’s mental health system was currently overwhelmed by a perfect storm of understaffing, funding gaps and increasing demand for services.

“Despite a royal commission and isolated areas of new investment, fundamental issues within the mental health system remain unaddressed and constrain the ability of clinicians and health services to respond to what are complex, resource intensive, and often highly unpredictable circumstances,” she said.

The final report from the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System made 65 recommendations, which the state government promised to implement in full. In 2022, Victoria imposed a new levy on businesses to fund improvements to the mental health system.

The state’s mental health watchdog has called for greater transparency about how the payroll tax – which raises more than $1 billion each year – is being spent.

A spokesperson for Eastern Health said while it was unable to comment on individual circumstances due to privacy and confidentiality, it followed established clinical, legal and governance frameworks.

A spokesperson for Mercy Health, which runs Werribee Mercy Hospital, said the health service extended its sincere condolences to Daddy’s family and loved ones following his death.

“The safety and wellbeing of our patients is always our highest priority,” they said.

“Our emergency departments and mental health and wellbeing teams assess every person who presents for care and determine the most appropriate treatment and support based on their clinical needs, in line with established clinical guidelines.”

Crisis support is available from Lifeline 13 11 14.

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