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In public child psychiatry in Victoria, Australia, we are currently having to justify to those who fund our services even the most basic requirements for the conditions in which we and our allied health colleagues are able to carry out our clinical work. Currently we are undergoing a process of having our services divided into smaller teams and re-located to small clinics in community settings. While the advantages of this process for better accessibility of our services is evident, this process occurs with insufficient thought and planning as to what constitutes a critical mass for a team that is sustainable. The needs of professional contact with our child psychiatry and other medical and non-medical colleagues have essentially not been considered.
In this context of re-location, it has been put forward that child psychiatrists or clinical staff working in the field of child psychiatry do not need an office or designated space in which to perform their clinical work. From the point of view of the policy makers who determine our funding, it is sufficient to have an office space that is shared with other clinicians and a few designated interview rooms. Part of the rationale used to justify the assertion that we do not require designated offices is the idea that in fact we should be spending most of our time out in the “community” where the “real” work is, along the lines of some specialized outreach and crisis services.
Thus the logical extrapolation of such policies is that it is sufficient for the clinician to have a car and a mobile phone in order to go to where the patients, or rather, “consumers” are. Furthermore, it implies that all clinicians are the same and work in the same ways, and thus fails to recognize the diversity and specialization in clinical practice. So why do child psychiatrists and other clinicians insist on having not just their own room to work in, but their own designated room, and that the room be a stable and a predictable one?
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