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Bendigo mental health workers rallied on Friday for improved service delivery, safe staffing levels, manageable workloads and wage rises.
More than 40 Health And Community Services Union members took protected industrial action from 1pm - 3pm outside Bendigo Hospital about ongoing enterprise agreement negotiations.
They called for motorists passing the corner of Lucan and Arnold Streets to honk for mental health services, and received no shortage of responses.
HACSU assistant state secretary Paul Healey said union members were “keen to send a strong message.”
“The suicide rate in Victoria is twice that of the road toll and the government hasn’t addressed that issue well,” he said.
“Also, there’s a high level of violence in the inpatient units and that’s causing the staff to be unable to treat the clients the way they need to be and demand has gone through the roof.”
Kyneton-based Bendigo Health registered psychiatric nurse in community mental health Ben Coombes has been in the industry for about 16 years, working interstate and in Victoria.
“At the moment its quite challenging, for a community anyway, to get a consensus on what the safe workload to patient ratio is and how many hours we should be doing to adequately treat patients,” he said.
He was hopeful protected industrial action would help continue to improve the outcomes of EBA negotiations.
“I’ve worked in Victoria since 2006. In the few EBAs we have had an increase in staffing, especially in inpatient units, which has really helped people get better treatment,” Mr Coombes said.
Bendigo Health was supportive of the EBA negotiation process and said earlier in the week it would manage affected areas to ensure patient and service disruption, if any, was minimised.