Appalling footage of a mentally ill woman stumbling around a NSW hospital, covered in faeces and falling over at least 25 times before she died of a brain injury, has shocked the public and politicians.
Footage released by the coroner shows the woman, mother-of-two Miriam Merten, locked in a seclusion room for more than five hours at the Lismore Adult Mental Health Inpatient Unit on 1 June 2014.
A nurse unlocks Merten’s room the next morning, before she is left to stumble around the hallway naked, eventually collapsing in a corner before an emergency crash cart is rushed in by staff.
Merten died at Lismore base hospital on 3 June 2014.
A coronial inquest found she died of “traumatic and hypoxic brain injury caused by numerous falls and the self-beating of her head on various surfaces, the latter not done with the intention of taking her own life”.
A senior nurse at the facility was aware Merten had been sedated with psychotropic drugs and fallen on at least one occasion, but failed to take appropriate action, the coroner Jeff Linden found.
A second nurse was also involved.
“The lack of care and compassion showed to the deceased was monumentally disgraceful and appeared to emanate from an: ‘Oh, it’s just Miriam’s mentality,” Linden said in his inquest findings.
“To see a mentally ill person in 2014 at a public hospital in NSW treated in such an appalling manner is really beyond comprehension.
“While this appears not to be a system failure it is clearly a serious human failure.”
The New South Wales Labor party on Friday called for an urgent parliamentary inquiry into the state’s mental health facilities.
Opposition mental health spokeswoman Tania Mihailuk says the incident is a “Don Dale moment” for the NSW mental health system and demonstrates “abhorrent mistreatment and abuse”.
Mihailuk said the government should apologise to Merten’s family and conduct a full and transparent review.
The federal health minister Greg Hunt said the two nurses “are no longer in service”, and the state government had Canberra’s “full support for the strongest possible steps against what was completely unacceptable”.
“I have (seen the footage) … it is deeply distressing,” Mr Hunt said in Sydney on Friday.
The NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian echoed that view.
“We’ll do everything we can to make sure this never happens again,” she told reporters.
Mentally ill woman"s treatment in Lismore hospital "deeply distressing", says Greg Hunt
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