Health boss slams Graylands
Health Department acting director-general Bryant Stokes has told a parliamentary committee Graylands psychiatric hospital should be ‘blown up’.
Professor Stokes said the state’s largest mental health institution should be bulldozed and patients and services moved to a more appropriate location.
The Western Australian Association of Mental Health has backed calls from the boss of the Health Department to close Graylands Hospital, agreeing the institution was ‘hopelessly outdated’.
Health Department acting director-general Bryant Stokes told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday Graylands should be ‘blown up’.
Professor Stokes said the state’s largest mental health institution should be bulldozed and patients and services moved to a more appropriate location.
He said the hospital belonged in ‘another century’, criticising the way it treated patients.
‘It goes back to the old mental asylum type situation,’ he said outside the hearing.
WAAMH president and Greens MLC Alison Xamon told 6PR Radio Graylands needed to be shut down.
‘What we know is the facility is the turn of the century, and we are not talking about the last century but the century before,’ she said.
‘It’s not somewhere you would want to send a loved one.’