Brian Rudman: Worriers should get down to earth

The "wrap us all in cotton wool" brigade are at it again. The Auckland District Health Board's disability support advisory committee is fussing over six internal air bridges linking one side of the new Grafton mega-hospital with the other.

The committee, headed by Associate Professor Margaret Horsburgh, is worried that suicidal patients will take advantage of these bridges, which stretch across an internal courtyard from floors four to nine, to plunge to their deaths.

The fevered imaginations on Professor Horsburgh's committee have come up with the nightmare of patients clambering up on to handrails then leaping over the 1.5m side walls into the void below. The kindest explanation is that the committee doesn't have enough real work to keep itself busy.

After all, there are plenty of eminently leapable sites in the existing hospital and no history, as far as I'm aware, of lemming-like behaviour on the part of the sick and afflicted.

The oncology department, for example, has a fourth-floor area opening out on to an atrium, with no loss, I'm told, of patients by this route. Yet when you think about it, the patients on this ward have more to be down about than most.

Just why the committee thinks the hospital's customers are more prone to leaping than people visiting any other of the city's many tall buildings, I don't know.

Just visiting a hospital is surely an indication the punter has an interest in getting well. Anyway, the customers who have actually made it inside are the lucky ones.

Not only have they negotiated the hospital waiting lists, but they've obviously also found somewhere to park their car. Chances are they're going to be downright cheery once inside.

I guess hospital project director Ian Wolstencroft has to be polite. He bit his tongue and responded to the committee's fears that people might climb onto the hand rail and jump off by saying, "We are assessing whether we can do something about that by taking that hand railing away".

But that's not likely to make the disability advisory committee very happy either. With no handrail, how would the non-suicidal halt and the lame they're supposed to also be looking out for stagger across for their treatment?

Mr Wolstencroft rather sensibly notes that acute mental health patients will not be accommodated in the building anyway. And why the committee thinks the rest of us will suddenly be moved, as if by whim, to take a flying leap, I can't imagine. If we wanted to do that there are plenty of other places in town with, as I noted before, much better parking facilities.

This is all something of a replay of the Grafton Bridge silliness. Just under a year ago, Auckland City spent $960,000 suicide-proofing the historic bridge with ugly curved, fume-trapping, noise-reflecting, Perspex sides.

The city council had been persuaded to install the barriers by mental health professionals who produced figures showing a significant increase in suicides from the bridge since the old barriers were removed in 1996.

In 1995 there had been one and in 1996 none, compared with two in 1997, five in 1998 and again in 1999, and three in 2000.

The council tended to ignore a report from it's own City Design consultancy which pointed out that matching the increase in suicides from Grafton Bridge was a fall-off in the popularity of other jumping sites.

Overall, the number of suicides by jumping in Auckland remained unchanged if you compared the two years before and after the removal of the barriers.

Since the new screens were completed, there has been one unsuccessful attempt as far as I can ascertain.

I do know that for the rest of us, walking across Grafton Bridge is now an unpleasant experience, trapped, as you are, in a tunnel of fume-belching traffic.



Was the $1 million expenditure and loss of amenity value worth it? It might have been if deaths had been prevented as a result. But a psychiatrist who has been monitoring the issue says he believes that where there's a will, people will sadly find a way and choose some other venue.

But not, he suspects, an air bridge in the new hospital. Unlike the movies, with people gathered around watching the lonely figure atop a building ledge, Auckland jumpers prefer a solitary, private end.

With that in mind, the health board's disability committee should leave the air bridges alone and get on with more useful work such as getting tough on central Auckland's perilous footpaths.

Kingston St by the district court would be a great place to begin.