AMA backs hospital’s detention concerns

Doctors from Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) have called on the Federal Government to end the practice of keeping children in detention, saying they can not effectively treat them.

A Royal Children’s Hospital spokeswoman said she could not confirm if the staff campaign extended to refusing to return children to detention.

Nearly 1,000 doctors, nurses and clinical support staff across the RCH have joined the call.

The hospital’s doctors and medical staff are also defying federal immigration authorities by refusing to return children in their care to detention, the Herald Sun newspaper reports.

“In children from detention, our team see children with nightmares, bed wetting, and severe behaviour problems, children from detention develop anxiety and depression”, he said.

It is understood there are no asylum seeker children now being held in the RCH.

“The high quality care and recovery they are receiving at the Royal Children’s Hospital and other hospitals around Australia will be diminished once the children are returned to the detention centres”.

They argued that conditions at the offshore centres perpetuate violence against women, children, families and gay men.

Royal Australian College of Physicians president Professor Nick Talley said he was in full support of removing children from immigration detention.

“We acknowledge the evidence that children in detention face circumstances which are very harmful to their health, their growth and their development”, vice president Stephen Parnis said.

“Every day children remain locked up; those children suffer and will continue to suffer for the rest of their lives”, she told reporters in Melbourne.

According to Australian Border Force statistics there are 93 children being held on Nauru and 104 children in detention in Australia.

Children were presenting having self-harmed, with anxiety, severe depression and not growing in a healthy or normal way, he said.

“The detention centres are not suitable environments for the health of all detainees, but the effects on children are far worse”.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has said he would not support a change in government policy.

He said that if children did need to be detained, then they should be released “in weeks” at the absolute most.

“We see a whole range of physical, mental, emotional and social disturbances that are really severe and we have no hope of improving these things when we have to discharge our patients back into detention”, one paediatrician said.

The federal government has committed to getting all children out of detention but has been criticised for the length of time it is taking and condemned for the continuing treatment of children in detention.

“The work of RCH doctors and nurses is highly valued by the Victorian community, and has made this hospital a global leader in adolescent and child health”.

Health Minister Jill Hennessy says she supports RCH staff, who may be risking up to two years’ jail under the Border Force Act, which prohibits health care workers and immigration detention staff from speaking out on the issue.